In bald prose, a powerful biker love story centered around Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Black’s debut memoir chronicles her escape from an abusive husband into the arms of a man from whom she learns the joy of deep love—and motorcycling.
It was 1995, and Black was looking around the partially empty house, where she “first came as an eighteen-year-old bride.” She was never in love with her husband, Tom, but sought “safety from the battlefield of [her] parents’ marriage.” This would be her second attempt at leaving. The first time, she had told her son, Steven, who told his father. “It had cost [her] bruised ribs and a twisted arm.” This time she took only Stephanie, her 15-year-old daughter, with her and began her new life. Reluctantly, she accepted a blind-date invitation for dinner with her friend Vicky; Vicky’s boyfriend, Tod; and Dwayne, a gregarious Texan. And so began an interesting and complicated love story. A whirlwind courtship of letters, daily calls, and 600-mile trips between Missouri and Texas followed. Black was a schoolteacher and Dwayne a Harley motorcycle mechanic. Eventually, she moved to Texas. After they married, he taught her how to ride a motorcycle, rebuilding a 1980 Harley for her to join him on his weekend rides. Secondary characters, including Dwayne’s mother and daughter and Black’s children, offer an inside peek into biker life and provide context for understanding the couple’s absolute devotion to one another. It’s a compelling narrative, despite Black’s unimaginative just-the-facts-style prose: e.g., “We pull into his driveway….He carries my suitcase into the rusty trailer….I follow him. We stand by his bed.” They were two damaged souls; she from a 23-year loveless marriage, a father who committed suicide, and a mother who ran out on her; he, a twice-divorced Vietnam vet contending with his own demons of low self-esteem (“You deserve better…than a half-assed mechanic who doesn’t have a real job”). Their shared love healed both. Black’s wholehearted adoption of Dwayne’s passion for Harley motorcycles was the finishing touch that bound their relationship. Have a box of tissues ready for the heartbreaking, poignant ending.
In bald prose, a powerful biker love story centered around Harley-Davidson motorcycles.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-620-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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