Endearing testimony that leaves the reader hoping for more.
A touching memoir of a life lived in faith.
In this short work, Bowles tells the moving story of her life in order “to encourage someone else.” The reader will indeed be encouraged by her positive attitude and sense of direction in the midst of hard travails. The book opens with Bowles’ childhood as the daughter of a single mother, with her father having died in an accident before her birth. Her mother mismanaged the household and suffered from debilitating mental illness. Nevertheless, the help, example and encouragement of other relatives gave Bowles direction and purpose in her youth. Against hard odds she earned a nursing degree and then decided to enter the residential-care field. Despite having no capital, she managed to obtain a house, and then survived and persevered for two years with almost no clientele. At last, she began to succeed in her chosen profession, but more setbacks were to come. Bowles was diagnosed with breast cancer, and, in addition to a mastectomy, her physicians suggested that her ovaries should be removed as a preventative measure. In a hair-raising climax to the author’s life story, Bowles explains how she was led to take a pregnancy test the very night before her surgery, and learned that she was, in fact, with child. Throughout Bowles’ tale, she clearly centers her narrative upon her personal faith in God. Though the reader will certainly come to see Bowles as a woman marked by perseverance, drive and courage, she takes no credit for her survival of hardship or the things she has accomplished in life. The reader is left, however, wishing that Bowles took more opportunity to flesh out that faith. Though references are made to certain individuals who made a difference in her faith life, it would be intriguing to hear a more in-depth discussion of her personal experience with the faith community and, not just how her faith has sustained her, but how that faith developed and matured over time. Bowles’ story is a meaningful and instructive one. It deserves a few pages more to make it complete.
Endearing testimony that leaves the reader hoping for more.Pub Date: May 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450067362
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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