A veteran Australian novelist and essayist returns with a motley, spirited collection of pieces dating back more than a decade.
One of the first things readers new to Garner (The House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial, 2015, etc.) will notice is her candor. She writes frankly about her youthful indiscretions, failed marriages, temper (she goes off on a teenage girl taunting older women), and ignorance about certain subjects (ballet, for example). She does so in the same frank and clear voice she uses throughout these essays that range from memories (a rare book from girlhood) to reviews (of films and personalities, from United 93 to the complete films of Russell Crowe) to searches for meaning in her quotidian experiences (she invariably finds something). A couple of times Garner mentions key dreams that conveniently fit with the theme of the piece, but she nonetheless convinces throughout that she is one on whom little is lost. Most pieces are quite brief, just several pages, and they appear in thematic rather than chronological order. Most are from the 2000s, but one about pianist Glenn Gould is from 1994: “J.S. Bach is God, as far as I’m concerned, and…Gould was one of his major prophets.” Throughout, we learn quite a bit about the author. Her feelings about her parents, her fondness for her ukulele, her gratitude to a tough teacher from girlhood, her admiration for writers (from Elizabeth Jolley to Janet Malcolm; she calls the latter “Dear boss”), her broken relationship with a family dog, her battle with depression, her responses to aging (she’s now 73)—these and other richly human subjects connect the author emotionally to her readers. Among the most engaging pieces are three selections from her diary; though generally very brief, they provide sharp images of her work, her reading, and her fellow travelers.
Like strolling around in an idiosyncratic, surprising, and informative museum.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-925355-36-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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