A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate.
Engrossing account of the exiled East German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984), who found an obscure shelter in a gray English backwater.
Wright, an accomplished interpreter of all things English, finds a site of frozen time in a bypassed place only 40-odd miles downriver from London, scorned by Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson for its “thousands and thousands of mobile homes, all of which I suspect belong to former London cabbies.” The Isle of Sheppey is indeed rather plain, emerging from the North Sea, Wright quips, “in a marshy and noncommittal kind of way.” Like so many edgelands, there was once a lot going on there, attested to by memories of a vast naval dockyard where a lucky survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade once worked; a half-sunken ship full of World War II ammunition that threatened to blow the town of Sheerness off the map; a hillside packed with the graves of Danes murdered at the behest of Aethelred the Unready “as an early ancestor of encroachment-hating Brexiteers”; and a rural schoolhouse once inhabited by a reformer who immigrated to Canada and became a feminist icon “who carried ancestral memories of Kentish radicalism with her as she campaigned for and among women farmers.” Into this milieu came Johnson, a curmudgeonly novelist who retained a Marxist vision even after fleeing East Germany—and who drank himself to death in Sheerness before the age of 50, “a man who wanted, by the end of his short life, to disappear into letters.” Johnson, whose magnum opus Anniversaries took decades to appear in English translation, found on Sheppey a rejoinder to his native Baltic coast, replete with Cold War vestiges (he descended into paranoia, convinced that his estranged wife was a spy). His grim determination to finish his late modernist masterpiece, despite his mental illness and alcoholism, befits the raw, forgotten places in which he lived.
A model portrait of person and place, a kind of cultural and literary geography that never fails to fascinate.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912248-60-5
Page Count: 740
Publisher: Repeater Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.
Daytime television’s most recognizable actress digs deeper in this second memoir.
Her career-defining, four decades–long stint on the daytime soap All My Children as the villainous Erica Kane has made Lucci a recognizable household name in daytime television circles. In this sophomore effort, comprised of a vivid and engaging collection of anecdotes and adventures, the actress reveals more intimate details of her struggles as well as her personal life and professional career. From the time she began performing in high school stage musicals, Lucci admits to always wanting to be onstage. Working through chronic shyness, her self-motivation and spirit drove her to pursue an acting career despite the many disappointments, callous dismissals, and various roadblocks that stood in her way. She expresses an open admiration for her parents, fellow performers who mentored her up the Hollywood ladder, and Muhammad Ali, who “owned his excellence,” as models of inspiration. Other sections reflect on her time as a working mother, the tricks to “growing old gracefully,” and how her faith, quest for joy, love of reading, and zest for life continue to sustain her. In an effort to create a more balanced memoir, Lucci also opens up to candidly share several sad and unsavory moments like being told she should probably abandon a career in television because she was too “ethnic looking”; the devastating day All My Children was canceled; the near loss of her son, Andreas, as an infant; and the feeling, upon the death of her husband, Helmut, in 2022, that the light within her “had gone out forever.” However crushing these events in her life were, they were counterbalanced with uplifting triumphs and only served as motivators to continue pushing forward to seek out the success and happiness she knew she deserved. With verve and perseverance, Lucci gleefully boasts about her starring roles in off-Broadway hits and concurrent film roles, yet, in her late 70s, she remains deeply grateful and humble and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798874868284
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
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