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
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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