An honest depiction of a courageous, difficult journey.
Mabee debuts with a touching memoir about a 21-year marriage that began with a most unusual purchase—a mountain in Albemarle County, Virginia.
In 1988, at the age of 40, Mabee, a Washington, D.C.–based lobbyist for nonprofit public health organizations, married a man named Timothy Bell. It was his second marriage and her first. For the next two decades, they worked together to build Tim’s business, a health care communications company, and shared a passion for the flora and fauna of their beloved retreat, Naked Mountain, which had a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The property, which spanned more than 283 acres, had no buildings on it; before they were able to build their house, they spent weekends there in a camper parked in a clearing. Meanwhile, Mabee gradually began cataloging and detailing the incredible variety of native plants and avian life that called Naked Mountain home. In 2006, she and her husband signed a conservation easement contract that made their property “the forty-ninth natural area preserve in the state of Virginia,” protecting it in perpetuity. When Mabee was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, it inspired her to begin writing the story of “how two…nature-ignorant suburban Washington professionals bought a mountain in central Virginia.” But just as she had her final treatment for her cancer, which went into remission, Tim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The latter portion of the book deals with her grief over losing him and her determination to move forward in a new relationship. Mabee’s smooth, skillful prose is vivid throughout, whether she’s describing the physical beauty of Naked Mountain (“Gradually rising soft blue peaks, complexly layered and rounded by millions of years of erosion, roll like massive ocean waves”) or the multiple, grueling surgeries that she endured on the way to recovery, which are not for the queasy. The volume is also filled with a wealth of intriguing ecological information (such as the fact that monarch butterflies, which stopped at the mountain on their annual migration, were being poisoned by pesticides) and geological history of the area. The author occasionally wanders too far into the botanical weeds in these sections, but overall, the narrative remains intensely personal and compelling.
An honest depiction of a courageous, difficult journey.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-097-6
Page Count: 221
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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