An uncommonly auspicious debut.
The debut collection by an essayist who writes like a rattlesnake, his sentences coiled yet always ready to strike with venomous impact.
One gets the sense that Whiting Writers’ Award winner Daniels is belatedly coming into his own and exercising some distinct literary muscle. These essays are presented as—but not necessarily written like—letters from the author to himself, and they could pass as fragmentary notes for a memoir or another much longer and more unified work. Not that this slim volume of six pieces doesn’t work on its own; they have a cumulative power that can leave readers devastated. Though “Letter from Majorca,” about his seafaring experiences after he abruptly “quit the university after shouting at a student until she began to cry,” has earned distinction by inclusion in Best American Essays 2013, others are even stronger. Perhaps the best is “Letter from Kentucky,” which found Daniels returning home on a magazine assignment but realizing, “it’s an old story. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh: you go back to the place but the place isn’t there anymore.” His spare, elemental prose conjures old haunts, old hurts, and old friends who are dead or are in prison before he goes deeper into a meditation on his father, whose “aim was to protect me from the darkness all around us, using the darkness inside himself.” Following this is the extraordinary “Letter from Level Four,” in which the author meets a man who is plainly mad and does his best to avoid him but also sees himself in him. He reflects on his own “brief stay in the hospital,” where “all of this, they told me, was reality. There are no other worlds than this one. There isn’t even this one.”
An uncommonly auspicious debut.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53594-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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