A disorderly work that still offers a few captivating glimpses of pioneer life.
Brown retells tales of his northwest Alabama family in this historical debut.
The author’s grandfather Clover McKinley Palmer was born in January 1899, the son of Blue John Palmer and Mary Dizenia. The author speculates that Clover’s conception took place in a field of “freshly bloomed purplish clover heads,” inspiring the boy’s unusual name. His grandfather’s legend, he writes, is “like all legends…a convoluted layering of facts and fables.” The opening of this pioneer tale describes Clover’s courtship and secret marriage to the author’s grandmother Cora Lee Goodson, which took place in the shade of a pine tree on a country road. The author then veers off to recount stories of Clover’s forebears; many of these are engaging, such as that of his third great-grandfather Dr. Russell Porter Palmer, who witnessed a cowgirl accidentally shoot her own horse, and his fourth great-grandfather William Mansell, who married a woman named Morning Dove White of the Cherokee Nation. The study is loaded with intrigue—including a familial link to Elvis Presley—and it will likely prove to be a valuable record for the author’s family. However, the execution is weak. The author rejects the use of a linear timeline, and as a result, his focus wanders back and forth between various ancestors, complicating the narrative and making the text difficult to follow. Stylistically, Brown’s writing is conversational but repetitive; for instance, he often draws upon a clumsy kaleidoscope metaphor: “Life is that way and the kaleidoscope within which it is contained may twist and turn in infinite directions.” Six pages later, he writes: “the kaleidoscope twisted and turned over the next decade,” and two pages on, he refers to “destiny’s kaleidoscope.” These references continue throughout and become tiring. The overall lack of organization is epitomized by the book’s idiosyncratic ending, which consists of the lyrics of two ballads followed by recipes and ancestral photographs.
A disorderly work that still offers a few captivating glimpses of pioneer life.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1537-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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
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