A welcome memoir of France that offers a complex mosaic of memories.
A rich, lucid debut memoir of an American hippie’s adventures on a goat farm in southern France in the early 1980s, pieced together from the author’s journals.
Murray writes with grace, complexity and humor of the months she spent living and working with a farming family in France’s Languedoc region in late 1980 and early ’81. Jumping into farm life cheerfully, with no running water and limited French, Murray quickly learned to make cheese, birth calves and survive on one bath a week. With compassion and candor, she vividly paints the strong personalities of the farm’s family members and hired hand and deftly describes the relationship she developed with each one. These interactions are fraught with cross-cultural misunderstandings, language barriers or good old-fashioned dislike. But they’re also interwoven with kindness, humor, simple pleasures and the joy of shared work. Murray provides both bleak and beautiful descriptions of the climate and landscape, along with meditations on her spiritual transformation and purification in the southern French mountains. She portrays her beloved goats as well as she does the humans in the story; as she grew fond of her little flock, she struggled to confront the harsh realities of farm life. But just as readers will weep at the death of baby goats, they’ll also laugh at the comical portrayals of truffle hunting and relish the descriptions of simple Christmas festivities and evenings spent reading by the fire. They may also admire the author’s metamorphosis from a privileged preppie to a hardworking farmhand who herded goats during raging blizzards. The author gives the narrative a strong sense of place and time with continual references to the popular culture and politics of the day. At the end, this highly enjoyable book turns somewhat unexpectedly toward the tragic, which invests the memoir with a rare balance of light and darkness.
A welcome memoir of France that offers a complex mosaic of memories.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
