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Letters from Galveston

A MEMOIR

Epistolary testimony to affection and the power of communication.

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A charming collection of heartfelt love letters from the early 1940s.

Rowe’s debut memoir is an epistolary tale of love and history as told through her father-in-law’s devoted letters to one of his sweethearts, Wanda. Starting in January 1942, Ed Rowe dashed a quick word to Wanda detailing the end of his first year in medical school, the reason he was in Galveston, Texas. As Ed made his way through the challenges of medical school, he shared his worries and triumphs with Wanda, who lived in Fairfield, Texas. The letters span a year and include anecdotes from Ed’s classes at medical school, book recommendations, and humorous tidbits about Ed’s roommates. His playfulness is apparent when he cites an account of one young man cutting the hair of another: “The radio was playing some swingy tune, and I don’t know whether the ‘barber’ knew it or not, but his hand in which he had the scissors was keeping time to the music and cutting hair all at once. You can imagine how wavy the other fellow’s hair is now.” His playful nature resurfaces when he says: “I had to stop writing a minute to throw some firecrackers at my roommate while he was in the shower. You should have seen him jump.” Amid Ed’s amusing and carefree writing is the serious undercurrent of oncoming war and registering for service in the Army. His personal story is peppered with references that sing of a different time, chronicling the simplicity of the ’40s. He writes with candor about his anxiety over his exams, his love for his friends, and his wistfulness for Wanda. Taking readers from his first year at medical school to his working in a children’s hospital, the letters eventually reveal his marriage. In a world where letter writing is almost obsolete, the charm of these handwritten notes, reprinted and transposed for the book, speaks of a different era and a lost art. 

Epistolary testimony to affection and the power of communication.

Pub Date: April 14, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-5035-5724-6

Page Count: 140

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: July 31, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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