Kaiser asserts her endearingly honest voice in this slim volume, raising profound questions about family and death, though...
A young widow who lost her mother takes solace in an unusual medium—a series of 16 confessional letters.
Kaiser’s deeply touching one-way correspondence has one ostensible purpose: to ask her dead mother for advice on communicating with her father. She doesn’t want to find herself writing more questioning missives to him after he’s gone. But these letters read more like diary entries; the author chronicles everyday happenings and free-associates them with standout childhood memories. In each, Kaiser divulges her admiration for her mother, who wrangled a household of eight children with nary a smudge of her omnipresent bright red lipstick and who made time to read to her brood each night; later in life, she maintained a Beanie Baby loaner library for her grandchildren. Kaiser expresses much gratitude, but she also feels compelled to explain times when she pulled away. “This next sentence is hard to write,” she confesses, “but somewhere in my growing up I learned not to expect emotional comfort from you.” She also wants to apologize for never taking her mother for a pedicure. A loved one’s absence amplifies the quotidian alongside bigger existential questions, and Kaiser captures that dichotomy with candor and grace. She owns up to her personal shortcomings, fashioning herself as a totally relatable narrator, much as Anne Lamott has done in her memoirs. Kaiser’s direct voice, steeped in the kind of wisdom that develops from experience, hints at the fact that she has performed these letters onstage; each letter a monologue, their shifts in emotional tone certainly would make for a compelling one-woman show. In book form, however, they leave the reader wanting more; much back story seems to have been deleted for the sake of a crisp delivery. Expanding each chapter to fill in gaps between the colorful vignettes would improve the work.
Kaiser asserts her endearingly honest voice in this slim volume, raising profound questions about family and death, though the epistolary format constrains its narrative potential.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1453600092
Page Count: 92
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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