A resonant, if sketchy, wilderness sojourn for seasoned or aspiring social-action volunteers.
A former Volunteers In Service To America initiate recounts his time in Alaska in this vicariously captivating, if underdeveloped, epistolary memoir.
In 1969, naturalist Wilson (Kodiak Island, 2014) fulfilled his lifelong wish to go to Alaska. Through his letters home, the author charts the year he spent with his wife, Suzie, in the Yupik village of Little Russian Mission. Although it takes a bit for the memoir to gain momentum, Wilson becomes a more observant and forthcoming correspondent as time passes. He often captures the primitive beauty of his surroundings, and although he seems to be a kindred spirit with Henry David Thoreau (“I sometimes think that when people traded the sounds of loons and the flocks of passing ducks and geese for well insulated and secure homes and jobs, that they may have given up the sounds and solitude for things of lesser worth”), he doesn’t romanticize the hardships; instead, he writes of how he spent grueling weeks living without his own cabin. “Most of the villages up here have no wells, water is obtained from the same rivers the honey buckets are emptied into,” he reports. “There is no electricity.” As he deals with life in these remote surroundings, where people can go months between hot showers (a luxury available in a village 13 miles away), the Vietnam War casts a long shadow; the author’s own draft status becomes a subplot. Wilson chides himself for his “minimalist writing”; for example, one letter contains a fleeting, benign mention of a hunting trip, and in a present-day note to readers, he reveals that the trip almost cost him his life. Readers may hope that Wilson someday revisits his Alaska experience, using his letters as a guide to render a more fully developed memoir, bringing readers closer to the people he met and addressing the tensions in his marriage (at one point, he refers to his wife as an “insignificant spouse”) and estrangement from his parents. Such a memoir might better convey the work he did, and the challenges he faced.
A resonant, if sketchy, wilderness sojourn for seasoned or aspiring social-action volunteers.Pub Date: July 7, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Graham Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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