An eclectic treasury of the cherished and the evocative.
A pensive perusal of the objects that can define and shape a life.
The materials that actress and essayist Lenney (Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, 2007) draws her inspiration from may be commonplace items, but to her, they “tell the stories of our lives.” The author reflects on integral items present throughout her history. Beloved is the Tiffany watch generously given as a wedding gift by her Grandpa Charlie, whose Steinway baby grand piano proved to be laborious to disassemble and relocate to her home in Los Angeles. Though uneven, the collection’s pieces build on each other, layer upon vivid layer of Lenney’s personal history, her heart firmly invested in hearth and home. The author’s family forms the centerpiece in a good portion of these ruminative writings, including a spontaneous, nostalgic revisit to her childhood home, an epistolary essay to her father, or a standout piece, “Nests,” which beautifully intertwines her sister’s dispirited emotional state with a family of watchful doves. Elsewhere, Lenney blissfully contemplates a spoon pilfered from summers spent at a resort, a scarf knitted during Hamlet rehearsals, a black dress that has escorted her through a temperamental acting career. One of the book’s most moving entries also happens to be its shortest: a strikingly gorgeous, two-page homage to Lenney’s daughter, portrayed as a young girl bouncing in the sun trailing a kite flush with bright streamers. Though she does tend to wander off on expository jaunts in less-engaging essays, the author remains a lyrical observer of everyday objects. Indeed, her truest passion lies in the heartfelt sentimentality for those things that “tether us to place and people and the past, to feeling and thought, to each other and ourselves, to some admittedly elusive understanding of the passage of time.”
An eclectic treasury of the cherished and the evocative.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-300-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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