A worthy selection of ardent musings, timely issues, and perceptive prose.
This fifth installment of a series centered on Princeton examines themes of race, media manipulation, and time traveling via the subconscious.
Clovis’ (Time Is the Length to Forever, 2018, etc.) latest volume, like the preceding novels, comprises short chapters and stories. Many of these deal with racism. The author, for example, tells of slaves in the United States traveling through Princeton on their way to freedom in the North. But slavery unfortunately existed at that time in the city. And though slavery and segregation have been abolished, the author astutely notes instances of racism and discrimination still happening today. She asserts that CBS’ “all white staff” that will cover the 2020 presidential election shows the lack of diversity among journalists. Other chapters sharply criticize media-related incidents, including the murder of journalists chasing civil or political stories and people getting their news from Facebook, which sells users’ personal data. But the author promotes positivity as well, from the celebrated release of the Gregory Hines postage stamp to the upcoming 50-year commemoration of Sesame Street. Throughout her series, Clovis has discussed assessing the past, present, and future via “the quantum field of consciousness,” which combines theories from Jung and Einstein. In this book, she skillfully traverses the “labyrinth of the subconscious” in successive chapters. It’s a surreal but engaging section: The White Rabbit of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland assigns Clovis the task of retrieving the red sap of the Dragon’s Blood Tree. Even with this break in reality, the author’s prose evokes a visually arresting scene: “The garden grows and expands, breaking boundaries, to reveal the steep terrain of a Vertigo dizzying mountain.” Clovis’ dreamlike journey entails traveling to the past and future, but also deftly reflects her personal feelings and experiences. One of the most telling scenes is when the author enters a restaurant of white linens and walls, filled with white patrons who stop eating to stare at the sole dark-skinned diner.
A worthy selection of ardent musings, timely issues, and perceptive prose.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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