In taut, sometimes-tense prose, Johnson shows us so many varieties of human pain as well as many glimmers of hope.
A writer with deep Appalachian roots rehearses his life story, positioning it under the most exacting of microscopes.
Harper’s contributor Johnson (The Man Who Loved Birds, 2016, etc.), who was born and raised “in the Kentucky Knobs, a westward-flung, northwest-curling finger of the Appalachians,” has a variety of topics on his agenda in these essays, which date to as early as 1989 and as recently as 2016; some appear for the first time here. His dawning awareness that he is gay, the death of his lover to AIDS in 1990 (his most painful memories of this occur in several essays), his struggles with religion (somewhat resolved in recent years), his determination to recognize love as the key to all—these subjects he visits throughout. In another way, Johnson, whose first name came from a Trappist monk who lived near his home, reveals other aspects of his personality and character less directly. Numerous literary allusions, for example, show his wide and eclectic reading. William James, George Eliot, Sophocles, Lewis Thomas, Thomas Merton, Mark Twain, and numerous others rise up continually in his prose to reaffirm or confirm a point, to illustrate, or to summarize. Johnson also evinces a fairly liberal political sensibility, and his 2014 essay on war and pacifism, “Power and Obedience: Restoring Pacifism to American Politics,” reveals the depths of his opposition to war. Johnson writes in a learned, serious, and occasionally erudite style, and he makes little use of irony or humor. Throughout the collection, we infer much about his personal life: his Kentucky boyhood, his undergraduate years at Stanford, and a bit about his teaching. One brief essay, “Witness and Storyteller,” from 2008, is even a tad erotic.
In taut, sometimes-tense prose, Johnson shows us so many varieties of human pain as well as many glimmers of hope.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941411-43-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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