An innovative epistolary memoir about grief and family.
Williams reads and responds to her father’s letters from World War II in this debut book.
This work is a correspondence of sorts. One-half is composed of the letters Williams’ father, the eventual Gen. Judson F. Miller, wrote from June 1944 to April 1946 while he was serving as the commander of a tank platoon in the European theater of World War II. The letters include his accounts of liberating French villages (“They almost smothered us with flowers and tried to drown us with cider & cognac”) as well as references to his experiences in the Hürtgen Forest (“I hate fighting in these big forests over here”) and the Battle of the Bulge (“The Krauts sure know more about winter fighting than we do”). Williams provides the other half of the correspondence after reading through her father’s letters seven decades later, in 2014, two years following Miller’s death. Williams responds directly to her dad, delighting in learning that he worked as a mess officer while stationed in England, while also recalling memories they shared and telling stories of her family’s life since his death. The reader can sense Williams working through her grief, an older daughter contemplating the words of her much younger father from across a gulf of time and experience. Williams, who wrote this engaging book while in her final year of college night classes following 22 years in the convenience-store business, asks her dead father, who had survived the war and married by the time he was 21: “Why is it that some people know their purpose in life at such a young age while others take a lifetime to find happiness and fulfillment?” The Miller who emerges from the letters—as well as the many photographs included in the text—is admirably cheerful and descriptive. His letters are directed to his parents and siblings, and he mostly spares them the horrors he surely witnessed, but the details he provides of the downtime of an American soldier in Europe are evocative and wonderful to read. Williams’ responses are thoughtful, quirky, and heartfelt. The combination is charming and thoroughly American.
An innovative epistolary memoir about grief and family.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944193-20-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Deeds Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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