An adventurous and macabre tribute to the eternal longevity of human bones.
A chronicle of the author’s visits to a selection of Europe’s bone chapels and her reflections on fear and mortality.
“The deposition of human remains always makes a statement,” writes academic Inge (Wanting Like a God: Desire and Freedom in the Works of Thomas Traherne, 2009, etc.), who completed this meditative amalgam of memoir and travelogue shortly before her death in 2014. Compelled by a nagging desire to brave life “unfrightened,” the author initiated an eccentric grand tour of four obscure Eastern and Central European ossuaries (where disarticulated bones of the dead are collected), beginning in a small Polish town and concluding in the Swiss Alps. Inge’s four-city pilgrimage was precipitated by the discovery that the town house she shared with her husband, an Anglican clergyman in Worcester, England, was built over a medieval charnel house complete with “sloping piles” of bones witnessed by candlelight through a cellar trapdoor. A reliably immersive guide whose prose only occasionally dips into indulgent stream-of-consciousness sections, Inge marvels over the stacked “walls of the dead” at an 18th-century chapel in Czermna; skulls roped together into “festive garlands” or hand-painted with names in the Czech Republic and Austria; and the 12-foot-high (and twice as wide) towers of crania in a Switzerland ossuary. Decorating this journey are ruminative musings on the nature of “death denial,” resurrection, and the author’s father’s passing, yet the bookending sections are perhaps the most effective at conveying Inge’s affinity for the nuances of death—though she only fleetingly mentions the inoperable cancer that would claim her own life. A thoughtful writer who believed her terminal diagnosis made life more “delicious,” Inge’s bone tour illuminates the expansive difference “between the humdrum everyday and heaped mortality.”
An adventurous and macabre tribute to the eternal longevity of human bones.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4729-1307-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor...
The stand-up comedian and actress opens up about her past and the perils of being a woman in comedy.
In her uncensored and often hilarious debut memoir, Haddish reveals pivotal events from her personal life that helped propel her toward the stage. “I got into the entertainment business so I could feel accepted,” she writes. “And loved. And safe.” After learning about the trials of her early years, readers will appreciate how trying to make a roomful of strangers laugh could prove easier than negotiating the minefield of the author’s home life. Though somewhat dismissive of her uncanny ability to rise above adversity, Haddish provides a colloquially written rags-to-riches story that is both impressive and harrowing. Abandoned by her father at age 3 and forced to live with her grandmother at 8, after her mother was in a devastating car accident that caused permanent brain damage, Haddish spent years taking care of her younger siblings or being abused while in foster care. She turned to humor as a defense mechanism, getting her comedic start as a teen working as an “energy producer” at bar mitzvahs around Los Angeles. Once her grandmother learned she would no longer receive financial support for caring for her granddaughter, she turned Haddish out, causing her to become homeless at 18. At 21, the author’s stepfather told her that not only was he responsible for the accident that had forever changed her mother, but that it had been meant to kill her and all her siblings so he could cash in on the life insurance. After learning this, Haddish says she started dating policemen. “It’s always good to have police friends,” she writes, “especially black police, because there aren’t a lot of them.” The author’s unrelenting positivity and openness about how insecurities about her own self-worth led to poor decisions later in life offer important lessons and hope for others seemingly trapped in toxic relationships.
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor can save your life.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.
Memoir of a literature professor who converted to Christianity in the halls of Oxford University.
Coming home for the holidays, Weber (English/Seattle Univ.) had a handsome young man with a jewelry box in his pocket waiting for her at the gate. Most girls would be excited, but not the author. As her ex–fiancé-to-be awaited her arrival, Weber found herself confiding to a concerned stranger that she'd been thinking about someone else: Jesus. It's an inauspicious beginning for a conversion story, inciting the same adverse reaction in readers as the author’s agnostic friends—nice, well-educated girls do not break up with their boyfriends and become Christians. But a lot has changed since Weber began her graduate studies at Oxford, an establishment where semesters with names like "Michaelmas" and "Hilary" frame a touching narrative of friendship, love and faith. There, the author was just as often inspired by Keats and the Beatles as she was by the Gospel. Weaving lines of poetry, philosophy and scripture into her narrative, Weber grasps at the meaning of life in the pages of great works of literature and overcomes her own childhood cynicism. Ultimately, a boy she refers to as TDK (i.e., tall, dark and handsome) won her heart and encouraged her to convert. When normal, 20-something trials ensued, notably a visit from a Georgia Peach in designer stilettos who threatened to steal her crush, the author’s new faith was put to the test. The delicately crafted moments when Weber’s faith allowed her to think more clearly and walk more gracefully through her life are, much like her romance, worth the wait.
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4611-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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