O’Gieblyn’s contemporary, hip voice is one people need to hear.
Personal essays rooted in religion with a Midwestern ethos.
In the preface to her first book, a collection of 15 mostly previously published pieces, O’Gieblyn characterizes the contents as primarily dealing with “questions about history and historical narratives” and her “abiding interest in loss.” The main loss is her own religion, evangelical Protestantism, which is the prism through which she smartly probes a variety of timely topics. “Although I no longer espouse this faith,” writes the author, “it’s hard to deny the mark it left on me.” In the longest and one of the best pieces, O’Gieblyn takes on the concept of hell. She recalls watching an instructional video in school about four kids killed in a car crash who end up in cages: “I was always too shell-shocked to find it redemptive.” She then recounts her time at the ultra-conservative Moody Bible Institute. Her stay there contributed mightily to her religious change of heart. However, she still finds herself “lurking” around the religion section of bookstores “like a porn addict sneaking a glance at a Victoria Secret’s catalog.” In a piece on John Updike, she confesses to having avoided his misogynistic-tinged fiction. The author was in a forgiving mood after reading his “great” novel Couples, which documents “one man’s fears about the limits of his own dominion—his dawning premonition that paradise is tenuous, and his to lose.” The sprightly “A Species of Origins” recounts a visit to Northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum, the “backwater fringe of creationism,” and its Ark Encounter, where visitors encounter “robotic beasts.” It posits a worldview, she writes, “that precludes the very possibility of inconvenient truths.” Other topics include Alcoholics Anonymous, the myth of motherhood, Henry Ford’s “vanity project,” Greenfield Village, and Mike Pence, a “curious kind of Christian politician.”
O’Gieblyn’s contemporary, hip voice is one people need to hear.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-56270-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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