A captivating family account that delivers compelling, acutely observant writing.
A wife comes to terms with her husband’s troubled past in this memoir.
“You were a preservationist, and I needed preserving,” joked Vernon, Fairley’s future husband, reflecting on his motivation for asking her out on a date. When they met, Vern, who was 32 years the author’s senior, was struggling to cope with the tragic death of his 14-year-old son, Ben, who was shot accidentally while playing with a revolver. Fairley fell in love with Vern’s “quirkiness”; they married, and, three months later, on her 25th birthday, the author discovered that she was pregnant. Soon after, Vern announced that the son of a recently deceased friend would be coming to stay with them temporarily. Taking care of 11-year-old Stanislaus was not what Fairley had expected during pregnancy. The situation became yet more fractious when Stanislaus was found to be a disturbed child, setting his bed afire and stabbing the family dog. With Vern’s health in decline, the stress of caring for Stanislaus forced the couple to reassess their marriage. The author strives to understand her husband’s inner struggles and, in doing so, unpacks some startling “sealed memories.” Fairley’s memoir is part mystery, leaving the author (and the audience) to guess at Vern’s true motives for taking in Stanislaus. Fairley’s slow reveal makes for absorbing reading. Throughout the volume, she maps her shifting emotions with a candid clarity: “I felt myself slump. In that moment, I realized another reason I had resisted Stan’s presence so fiercely: time was a commodity in my relationship with Vern.” The author has an occasional tendency to share extraneous information. Describing their dog, Chippie, she notes: “He’d developed a severe anal sac problem and would scoot along the floor, leaving oily anal juice on everything.” Fairley’s scrupulous attention to detail is put to better use when capturing the ambience of small-town Ohio: “I loved the screened-in porch, the way it overlooked the old footbridge with the cast-iron street lamp….The old furnace pumped out heat that smelled of kerosene in the winter.” At its best, the author’s writing is evocative, and her story is both unique and intriguing. Despite the sporadic digressions, this is a book that many readers will find difficult to put down.
A captivating family account that delivers compelling, acutely observant writing.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-067-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
