A jovial, greatly contemplative, and uplifting memoir comprising anecdotes and apt memorialization mixed with an unmatched...
A Pennsylvania author and photographer shares spirited vignettes of joy and bittersweet change from a life of “hitches and contradictions.”
Vastly pensive and thoughtful, Budzinski’s debut memoir reflects on the nature of death and lingers over its inevitability while pondering the importance of leaving a lasting legacy in one’s wake. As he aged, intellectual retention, the nature of memories, and living in the moment became paramount. “Enjoy the current moment and live it as best you can, because right now is the last time you will see it,” the Polish sexagenarian counsels. Always amiable, proactive, and never preachy, the author is a charming writer who applies a smooth conversational tone to the generous anecdotal mementos he shares. Committing a life to print is no easy task, he admits, recognizing that recollections fade with time and that there are so many “dots to connect” in order to fully and appropriately commemorate an eventful journey. Budzinski reaches back to his earliest days and draws stories from his youth in the 1960s and ’70s, delivering newspapers, bravely racing across spooky cemeteries with boyhood friends, loving Treasure Island and Star Wars, and serving as an impressionable altar boy. Young adulthood at a college in Virginia brought its share of new experiences and challenges. The author also contributes some favorite unique gifts he’s received and thought-provoking “life is strange” moments where interpersonal foibles make for humorous and intriguing reading. Some tales strike a more bittersweet note, as when Budzinski remembers his father who died when he was 8 years old and regrets that he “never had the chance to make promises to him.” Some recollections reflect the many transitions the author experienced, whether through childhood friendships, family, or other people, including Jennifer, the daughter of a longtime friend, whom he grew closer to as the years passed. Though some material becomes repetitive and his rhetorical questions tend to overwhelm pivotal points at times, all of Budzinski’s anecdotes and collected impressions are expressed unhurriedly, with exacting detail and the kind of writerly personality and passion that is delightfully palpable across the pages. “Many moments we carry with us will never make the highlight reel,” he laments. “We edit them out from the book of love that is our story.” Whether humorous, poignant, or insightfully sage, his tales and amiable prose will become cherished reading for older readers who can relate to the author’s need to savor memories and commit the best of the bunch to a significant, living epitaph of his days on Earth. Like spending a long, lazy afternoon on the front porch swing with a chatty, beloved grandparent, Budzinski’s personal stories resonate with all the grace, humor, dignity, and earned wisdom of a life well-lived.
A jovial, greatly contemplative, and uplifting memoir comprising anecdotes and apt memorialization mixed with an unmatched zest for life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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