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LOVE, H

Name: LOVE, H
Author: Hettie Jones
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6146-6

THE LETTERS OF HELENE DORN AND HETTIE JONES

by Hettie Jones & Helene Dorn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2016

A fertile trove that needs a stronger framework.

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Letters revealing the enduring friendship of two “beat chicks.”

In 1990, poet, children’s book author, and memoirist Jones (Writing/New School; Doing Seventy, 2007, etc.) published How I Became Hettie Jones, which recalled “sixties bohemia” and her marriage to poet and activist LeRoi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka) and featured figures such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Joyce Johnson. “Scholars have tended to heroicize ‘beat chicks’ who lived through that scene and got out alive,” she writes; her memoir was both testimony and corrective. Urged by friends to continue her story, Jones has chosen to select from 40 years of correspondence with Helene Dorn (1927-2004), an artist and ex-wife of poet Ed Dorn. Like poems, Jones says, letters “offer voices.” However, readers unfamiliar with the writers would be well-served by contextualizing information, including a more detailed introduction to the volume and to each of the 17 chapters. Jones does provide some narrative linking the letters but not enough to round out a coherent story of each woman’s life. What does emerge is an inkling of the friendship, understanding, and empathy between the two women who saw themselves as “Babes in Boyland.” Both were raising their children alone, and both struggled financially and artistically. Jones, living in New York, had more opportunities: she taught writing, gave readings, and made publishing connections. Dorn, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, seems more isolated. Some letters are just a few lines, some appear to be excerpted, and some were sent as emails, a challenging medium, especially for Dorn. The letters include mundane events such as car and computer trouble; opinions about books, movies, and art shows; gossip; commiseration about illness, housing troubles, and the challenges of aging; and, occasionally, politics. In 1988, for example, to support Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Jones vowed to buy no more grapes. In 1989, she describes her experience at a pro-choice rally in Washington. Both were overcome with dismay after 9/11.

A fertile trove that needs a stronger framework.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6146-6

Page Count: 376

Publisher: Duke Univ.

Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM MIDNIGHT TO DAWN
by Jacqueline L. Tobin with Hettie Jones

- BOOK REVIEW
NO WOMAN NO CRY
by Rita Marley with Hettie Jones

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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)