An animated story of survival and an exuberant display of how to live well.
In this debut memoir, a fight with pancreatic cancer prompts the author to reflect on life, meditate on mortality, and enumerate the pleasures of company and food.
From the beginning, Grau promises to lighten the account of her cancer battle with a hefty dose of humor. “Laughter over tears,” she writes, “because without the ability to laugh, the urge to surrender would be too strong.” After the tumor was discovered and as the treatment began, she sent cheeky email updates to the members of her community center in Cambria, California, where she taught dance aerobics and weight training. The author sprinkles these emails throughout the book, and though they often take the shortest route to easy gallows humor, it’s enjoyable to read these lively and irreverent missives. Grau sometimes resorts to platitudes like “Hadn’t I heard somewhere that laughter is the best medicine?,” which can derail otherwise well-paced sections. Not all attempts at comedy land, but the depiction of an overenthusiastic local surgeon is as funny as it is unsettling. In another creatively rendered and well-executed passage, the author uses the tasting notes of wine to describe the flavor of her drug regimen. Other parts speak to paranoia and mortality, as when Grau begins connecting various scrapes with death into a single narrative of survival. The author calls herself a “toughie,” her dad’s phrase, and suggests her surviving cancer isn’t unrelated to her growing up in the South Bronx. Grau’s attempts at humor do lighten the mood of the work, even if they fail to distinguish it much from other accounts of cancer battles. But the book doesn’t really aim to break new ground, and though it delivers familiar truisms about cherishing loved ones, savoring the good times, and being grateful for life, it owns up to its treacly spirit. A truism might not be new or interesting—but at least it’s true, and at most a source of comfort to someone who wants it.
An animated story of survival and an exuberant display of how to live well.Pub Date: March 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73359-090-7
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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