An eclectic, appealingly no-nonsense set of appreciations of the heartland.
A clutch of personal essays about Midwestern life that captures the region’s humor, seriousness, and occasional strangeness.
This collection by poet and essayist Reese (English/Mount Marty Coll.; Really Happy!, 2014, etc.) contains a handful of interludes cataloging bumper stickers he’s seen in his travels through the Midwest and Great Plains: “Nuke the Whales”; “Don’t Mess with My Country”; “Against abortion? Don’t have one.” They underscore his point that it’s a region of the country that’s hard to pin down. From essay to essay, Reese bemusedly works to sort it out—blessedly, without a hint of Garrison Keillor’s labored folksiness. In one comic piece, Reese recalls his ill-fated stint as Willy the Wildcat, mascot of Detroit’s Wayne State University; alcohol, come-ons, and physical abuse all came with the job. Elsewhere, he chronicles his struggles to fit in with a hard-drinking friend in rural Nebraska and the years he spent trying to get closer to his close-lipped in-laws. “I question my own existence and purpose in life every time I leave this new home of mine,” he writes, but he approaches the region from a place of tenderness; the title essay is an admiring portrait of his father-in-law straining to keep hold of his farm. But the narrative’s true centerpiece is an essay reconciling his childhood fears growing up in Omaha with his hesitance to teach writing in prisons, something he’s done for a dozen years regardless. There, he masterfully weaves his personal history with observations of the prison system both intimately (in the prisoner’s writings, their tattoos, the strict regulations) and broadly (the troubled prison system, race and class divides). By comparison, some of the shorter pieces in the closing pages feel slight: riffs on watching TV at the gym, reading Harry Potter with his daughter, or visiting a memorial for a hanged circus elephant. But the variety is the appeal, and Reese is skilled in many registers.
An eclectic, appealingly no-nonsense set of appreciations of the heartland.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62288-203-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin State University Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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