A candid, subtly profound collection.
Franklin (English/Brigham Young Univ.) meditates on the nature of manhood by reflecting on his life as a married father of three boys.
In this warm, engaging collection of 14 personal essays, the author offers a masculine take on love, commitment, parenthood, and living contentedly in an imperfect world. He opens with a reflection on kissing, its association with “bases, bats, and balls,” and the “sliding, stealing, and striking out” associated with the male world of baseball. But for Franklin, kissing is a far more complex act than this misogynistic metaphor suggests. It can not only express affection, but also signify everything from transcendent romance to animal lust. Life as a married man has shown him that love goes beyond mere physical attachment to an object of desire. In “Working at Wendy’s,” Franklin tells the story of a temporary job he took at a fast-food restaurant to support the needs of his college-going wife and their young son. Though humble, the job provided “an honest wage” for his family while revealing just how privileged his education had made him. While growing into manhood provided Franklin with lessons on the importance of putting others before himself, it also revealed the futility of equating masculinity with outward physical attributes like hair. A balding Franklin now teaches his sons to enjoy what they have “while it lasts” rather than hold onto it too tightly. Patience, tolerance, and humor are also essential to the modern man. “Houseguests” is the author’s witty account of his ongoing battle against the roaches he sees as the true owners of his family dream home. Franklin’s focus on daily life makes his book down to earth and entirely accessible. Taken together, his essays reveal the ways men can not only survive their own socialization, but also take quiet pleasure and pride in being male.
A candid, subtly profound collection.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7844-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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