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COME SEPTEMBER

Name: COME SEPTEMBER
Author: Harriet A. Robinson
ISBN: 978-1-5127-5306-6

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMOIR

by Harriet A. Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2016

A sometimes-saccharine but positive collection of personal and imagined accounts.

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A woman charts her own life’s journey and provides an account of the African-American experience through a kaleidoscope of nonfiction essays and fictionalized vignettes.

Using “conversations, some in fantasy, most in reality,” this collection incorporates many years’ worth of essays, poems, songs, plays, and journal entries by Robinson (Brewer Genealogy, 2016) over her life as a writer and a storyteller. The collection is divided into five sections: “Expressions of Hope,” “Expressions of Wonder,” “Faith,” “Introspection,” and “Pain and Contemplation.” Except for the last, the tone is unvaryingly uplifting and often humorous. Robinson’s Christian beliefs are also infused into her work; for example, she includes short biblical verses at the beginning of each section and lyrics from public-domain spirituals in her plays. However, her faith is a touchstone rather than her primary subject, which is African-American history. When one historical figure, educator, and civil-rights activist, Mary McLeod Bethune, shows up as a subject in one of the plays, Robinson makes a key point about biographical fiction that also informs this work: “writers have to use their common sense and imagination while being as true as they can to all the information that is available to them.” In “Pain and Contemplation,” she grows more serious and laments disunity in families—the backbiting, pettiness, and dysfunction that can tear people apart or even kill them. Most of her characters are women, but she also memorably creates a grandfather who’s exploited by a troubled free spirit. The book aims for a tone similar to that of the famous 1954 E.B. White story “The Second Tree from the Corner,” but it falls short of White’s wit and wry style; instead, it’s a bit syrupy and too often peppered with exclamation points. Robinson also could have let her tales unfold more naturally, instead of offering long soliloquies and expository dialogue. The book’s portrayal of the way young people talk also seems a bit idealized and unrealistic (“Really! That’s neat”).

A sometimes-saccharine but positive collection of personal and imagined accounts.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5127-5306-6

Page Count: 170

Publisher: Westbow Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)