A memoir that’s a wild, wrenching ride but one worth taking.
An account of a wide-ranging life that embodies the phrase, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Montandon (Oh the Hell of It All, 2009, etc.) has written a memoir that almost becomes a full autobiography, although it compresses her last few decades into a couple of chapters. She grew up in the 1930s in a large, dirt-poor Dust Bowl–era Oklahoma family. Her father was a preacher, and the family had to move often—sometimes because her father believed, to his credit, that black people should be welcome among his white congregation. Nonetheless, the members of her family were Old Testament fundamentalists; the focus was on hell, not heaven, and any wrong step, anything construed as loose, secular living, could send you there. She eventually grew into a statuesque stunner, which exacerbated her widowed mother’s worries. At 18, the naïve young woman married a fellow from the Air Force who turned out to be a real jerk, but guilt-ridden as always, she tried to be a good wife as they spent two years in the Azores. Finally, a very kind lover aided her in finding herself, and she also found that she’d had enough of her marriage. Stateside, she divorced Groves and wound up in San Francisco, where she blossomed, becoming a television personality, newspaper columnist, socialite and Nobel Prize–nominated peace activist. The memoir’s byword is “indomitable”; by the age of 30, despite her past trials, the author wasn’t afraid of anything and had roaring energy. (The book’s initially silly-sounding title refers to a traumatic accident that colored her whole life.) Montandon often writes well, although her style is sometimes over-the-top and her diction, sometimes purple (“My tears fell in an unbridled waterfall, pooling at my feet, flowing across the highway, creating a flood of such profound intensity that I turned on the windshield wipers”). Still, readers learn a lot about what she had to face and how she survived. She writes of how, even in later years, some of her siblings were still captives of hateful beliefs; it’s all the more striking that the author, with her native intelligence and sensibility, managed to escape such an upbringing while still loving her family.
A memoir that’s a wild, wrenching ride but one worth taking.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1633156456
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.”...
The writing life at age 85.
In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy….” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me….For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544287044
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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