A hushed but resonant literary memoir.
Lambert (Termcraft, 2014) records the life a 20th-century schoolteacher in Bordeaux.
At the end of this biography of Madame Hébert, formerly Micheline Ponthier, Lambert writes that the nonagenarian felt gratified that someone had finally put her life down on paper. “The past was not hers anymore now that it existed in a written form, and it would be up to the reader, especially the younger generation, to draw a lesson from it.” The lesson is embedded in the history of a woman, born in 1916 France, who worked as a teacher when the Germans invaded in 1940. Against the backdrop of World War II, the young Catholic Micheline entered into a forbidden love affair with a young Protestant doctor. The relationship was doomed. After the war, Hébert became the director of a training center for women and married a widower with children. Decades later, after her husband, too, had died, Hébert worked with the author to attempt to quiet the competing forces of her recollection and set her memories in order, putting to rest the dead and finding redemption for the living. The book is an unorthodox biography. The names used to describe the characters appear to be pseudonyms (the book is dedicated to a “Madame H***”). The work is as much about the creation of biography as it is about Hébert herself. Lambert exists as a gentle presence at the margins, the receiver of Hébert’s musings and memories. We learn of a previous attempt at setting things down: “Madame Hébert had decided to hire a ‘ghostwriter,’ but the final product failed to satisfy her: one hundred and one pages for a life, her life, filled with emptiness and clichés.” Included along with her sometimes stream-of-consciousness thoughts are many letters, photographs, and drawings of various sites in Bordeaux. The mixed media, along with the blurred line between biography and literary novel, brings to mind the writings of W.G. Sebald. The fractured nature of the narrative, dotted with artifacts of the past, provides a compelling method for telling the story of a life marred by war and loss.
A hushed but resonant literary memoir.Pub Date: May 25, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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