A moving and bittersweet memoir of a woman’s love affair with a unique profession.
An intimate account of what it means to be a female wildland firefighter.
Essayist and novelist Emerick (The Geography of Water, 2015) dissects the passion that kept her on the fire line for more than 20 years. Just out of college in the mid-1980s, she traveled to Olympic National Park for a summer job. Insecure but seeking to break out of her shell, she accepted an assignment on the fire line during an especially nasty fire season. Though not convinced firefighting was the right path, Emerick imagined the new self that would result from the excitement and stress of the job: “The person I imagined I would become by fighting fire was someone better: tan, long-braided, self-sufficient, strong.” The author’s choice led to two decades of fighting fires in multiple states, all the while absorbing the incredible sights, smells, and sounds of fire. Emerick vividly recounts the extremely taxing physical requirements, the deadly conditions firefighters consistently endure, and the ever present lure of adventure and camaraderie each fire provides. The author explores the implications of working in a male-dominated field and how that environment has improved during her tenure. She also shares her knowledge of different species of trees and how each burns as well as the tools and equipment needed to fight fires. Crisscrossing the country with the seasons, the author fought fires in the Western U.S during the summer and worked winters in the Florida swamps. Emerick is candid about her work’s toll on unfulfilled romances and a broken marriage. After years as a firefighter, Emerick questions the environmental policy of snuffing out all fires and “whether all this firefighting was really good for the forest, if it might not better just to let it burn.”
A moving and bittersweet memoir of a woman’s love affair with a unique profession.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-843-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
What we've all been awaiting: the first of Hemingway's posthumous works he began in 1958 and finished in 1960. This is a memoir of his expatriate days in the twenties, and MacLeish's little poem about the young man with the panther good looks who whittled a style for his times in the sawmill attic in Paris comes to life here. What also comes to light is the "inside story," or the very personal revelations, parts of whicy may become a cause scandale. Not only is the Fitzgerald portrait ungenerous, but the disclosures of his sexual difficulties with Zelda are embarrassing. Miss Stein is also victimized, and there are allusions to puzzling perversities. Pound, Ford, Eliot, Lewis and Joyce are around and they are treated with affection, or affectionate malice. The best passages are the descriptive ones— fine writing with all the supple surety of Sun— of bookstalls, cafes, streets, the Seine, race tracks, and travel. And of course there's Hemingway on his wife Hadley, and Hemingway on Hemingway..... Mary McCarthy's famous attack on Salinger scored him for following Papa's special club of OK people (like him) versus the "others" (unlike him). The memoir has something of that snobbery and certain people may go after it accordingly. Still, whatever the indiscretions, it is an important work, a literary source from a master. There can be little doubt of its interest and attraction for many as a reprise of a now legendary time when Hemingway was young and happy and "invulnerable," and a place— well, "There is never any ending to Paris.
Pub Date: May 5, 1964
ISBN: 0684833638
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1964
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment.
A cocky bad boy of finance recalls, in much detail and scabrous language, his nasty career as a master of his own universe.
At a young age, in an industry with many precocious bandits, Belfort ran a Long Island–based brokerage with the deceptively WASP-y name of Stratton Oakmont. It was a bucket shop habitually engaged in crooked underwritings. Its persuasive boss was a stock manipulator and tax dodger; he details the stock kiting, share parking, money laundering and customer swindles. Many millions poured in, and cash brought with it excess upon excess. Along with compliant women and copious drugs, there were multiple mansions, many servants, aircraft, yachts and, for all the guys on the trading floor, trophy wives. Among his under-the-table and beneath-the-sheets activities, the author’s most imperative seemed to be sex and dope-taking, despite his professed abiding love for his (now ex) wife and kids. Belfort’s portrait of his family is vivid, as is his depiction of the merry cast of supporting players: sweet Aunt Patricia, a Swiss forger, evil garmentos, Mad Max (Stratton’s CFO and his father). The melodrama covers coke snorting, Quaalude eating, kinky sex, violence, car wrecks, even a sick child and a storm at sea. “A cautionary tale,” the author calls it. It is crass, certainly, and vulgar—and a hell of a read. Belfort displays dirty writing skills many basis points above his tricky ilk. His chronicle ends with his arrest for fraud. Now, with 22 months in the slammer behind him, he’s working on his next book.
Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-553-80546-8
Page Count: 522
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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