by Karen Wiand ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 12, 2018
A sweet, wide-eyed, feel-good account about a family friend.
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A debut memoir tells the story of a disabled friend who taught the author valuable life lessons.
In the late 1960s, Wiand’s family, which included seven children, moved to Carson City, Michigan, where the kids hoped to make new friends. Enter Eddie Lee—a good-natured, 15-year-old boy with developmental disabilities—who showed up at their door clutching a fistful of peacock feathers. This unique welcome turned into an enduring friendship, and the fun-filled adventures of Eddie became legendary in the author’s family. Affectionately dubbed “Fast Eddie” for the way he zoomed around town on his bicycle, he hadn’t always been so happy. He had been neglected as a baby, and starvation caused permanent brain damage and near blindness in one eye. Thankfully, a loving woman named Tilly convinced her husband that they should adopt him. Tilly taught Eddie how to ride a bike. He started riding it all over town, meeting new friends, collecting bottles to sell, and working odd jobs. And even though he was often bullied, Eddie managed to find joy in life. After growing up, Eddie and Wiand lost touch for more than 30 years, but then they reconnected in 2009. Elderly Tilly had been institutionalized, and Eddie was living with unscrupulous caregivers in horrible conditions. Not to worry—much like Fast Eddie, this often poignant account remains optimistic. Ten brisk chapters offer compelling Eddie anecdotes along with accompanying life lessons. For example, Chapter 6, “Treasure Everything,” tenderly describes how Eddie always had a pocket full of surprises—like arrowheads or a lucky rabbit’s foot—he’d found while neighborhood scavenging. Wiand urges readers to remember that real treasures don’t involve money. There’s some humor here, too. Chapter 2, “Believe In Yourself,” details how Eddie—despite the doubts of others—expertly drove the kids home from a lake after Grandpa got too drunk to handle the task. Regardless of the situation, Eddie’s a memorable guy, and—like curling up on the couch while eating ice cream and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie—this smooth-flowing, heartwarming memoir is comforting.
A sweet, wide-eyed, feel-good account about a family friend.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980223-0-7
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Carlysle & Lloyd Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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