by John Daniel ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2005
Daniel’s time alone is potent, a dilation on the amusements and scorchings of the simple life, and a distillation of the...
A candid but polished sojourn into solitude and memory.
Late in 2000, poet and essayist Daniel (Winter Creek, 2002, etc.) took himself deep into the backcountry of Oregon for a few months of solitude, to a cabin without electricity or neighbors, tucked into a canyon with forested slopes. The Rogue River slid by within earshot, and there was a meadow to watch the comings and goings of wildlife. Daniel was there to see how he might grow, what he might learn, from the quietude, but he got distracted. The memory of his father, Franz Daniel, was a prime diversion and puzzle. Franz was an intellectual with rural roots, a union organizer of uncommon zeal and charisma, drawn to the ministry but more so to applied religion, social justice, decency—and the bottle. As Daniel goes about his distracted way—dueling with the turkey that’s eating his garden goods, tendering a theory of grouse (they know when a human in their midst has a gun), reveling in the visit of a bobcat, coming to “love the little particularities of things, their jags and curves and rough or silky textures, the exactly this that they present”—he quarries his father’s life, finding in it an enormous, nurturing good, even while the house he grew up in was one of drunkenness and anger. Then, too, his own life beckons, urging him to quit the fretting, “do what you're doing,” live the moment. Still, he’ll look long and hard at the path that has brought him to this juncture, his own strong and weak suits—the question of courage in all its ambiguity won’t go begging in these pages—that brought into being whatever resources of attention and creative association he now possesses.
Daniel’s time alone is potent, a dilation on the amusements and scorchings of the simple life, and a distillation of the strange, human group that was his family.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-051-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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