A travelogue filled with historic places, but its personal stories provide its highlights.
A 55-year-old woman and her husband uproot their lives to take a yearlong European tour in Bohr’s debut memoir.
Relatively few people get the opportunity to travel abroad for a significant amount of time, exploring culture, history, and cuisine in different parts of the world. Bohr got not one, but two such chances. Her first, as a graduate student, was a bare-bones, laissez-faire journey, but her second, as a wife and mother who qualified for senior discounts, was a much more carefully planned-out affair. In fact, it took Bohr and her husband, Joe, many years to plan their own “gap year,” in which they hoped to visit more than 20 different countries. Most readers may find their preparations daunting, if not downright terrifying: they developed and executed a calculated savings plan, quit their jobs, and sold half of their worldly belongings. By sticking to their schedule and budget, they managed to see several nations throughout Europe and even took a foray into Africa. The journey, which may seem like an all-but-impossible undertaking, is made very real through Bohr’s frank accounts of their planning, discussions, and decision-making over several years to make their trip a reality. Bohr frequently details the histories of the sites they visited, often providing as much background information as a comprehensive travel guide. Some readers may wish that she had included pictures or illustrations to complement her descriptions, however. At more than 350 pages, this isn’t a memoir to breeze through. Indeed, at times, the lengthy, myriad descriptions and leisurely pace may remind some of watching a friend’s vacation slide show. Bohr shines, however, when she provides glimpses of herself as a whole person, not simply a traveler; for example, her disappointment about their visit to Morocco, where she experienced pushy salespeople, con artists, refuse-filled streets, and dispiriting poverty, is at once visceral and relatable. Her book is an excellent choice for armchair travelers who want to see the sites but are in no particular hurry to do so.
A travelogue filled with historic places, but its personal stories provide its highlights.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-820-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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