A further addition to the collective writings of that band of well-born European women who go out to Kenya, suffer personal tragedies, but find fulfillment and themselves in the demi-Edens they can afford to create. As a young girl, Italian-born Gallmann yearned to go to Africa: ``...it was a memory carried in my genes. That urge to fly home like swallows.'' Divorced, with a young son, and nearly crippled by a serious automobile accident, she first made a brief visit to Kenya at the age of 25. Three years later, Gallmann and her new husband, Paolo, a widower with two daughters, returned and purchased the enormous Ol Ari Nyro ranch on the edge of the great Rift Valley. A place of great beauty, it was also known for its ``abundance and variety of wildlife, mainly black rhino, elephant and buffalo.'' Here Kuki and Paolo spent idyllic days tracking elephants, hunting buffalos, and building a house. They vacationed on the Kenyan coast, where they fished; flew planes here and there at whim; and found amply time and help for frequent and abundant entertainment. But Gallmann was haunted by an impending sense of tragedy. In 1980, her beloved Paolo was killed in car crash; three years later, so Emanuelle died from snakebite. Devastated but resilient, Gallmann, with the help of people like Richard Leakey, decided to turn the ranch into a living memorial for her husband and son, dedicated to the preservation of the local plants and wildlife. Lots of game-watching, breathtaking sunsets, and loyal tribesmen-all the staples of the old African Raj are present, with a moving personal story thrown in as well. But the prose is overblown and the realities of current Africa ignored, leaving simply a diverting read for uncritical nostalgia buffs.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83612-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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