A thoughtful reflection on life, marriage, and child-rearing told from a unique perspective.
A memoir about a couple who were inspired by anti–Vietnam War sentiments and the return-to-nature movement of the 1970s to pull up stakes in the American Midwest and make a new life in Canada.
Nothing in their upbringing prepared the author and her husband for their future adventures when, in 1972, they bought a 300-acre farm in Echo Bay in northern Ontario. They had moved from America to Canada four years earlier, after learning that the baby they were expecting would not exempt Jack Dunning from the Vietnam draft. Now, they were fulfilling a dream of becoming homesteaders. In this evocative remembrance, Dunning (Education in Canada, 1997) looks back at how she, a young woman from a middle-class Quaker family in Pennsylvania, and her spouse, a young man from a wealthy family in Connecticut, wound up raising goats, chickens, and cattle and learned, often painfully, the difficulties of plowing, planting, harvesting, and baling. In addition to doing such fieldwork, Jack had a position teaching psychology at Algoma College in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Dunning, meanwhile, took care of their three small children (Erica, Robin, and Galen), gathered eggs, tended the vegetable garden, fed and watered the livestock, and milked the goats, among other tasks. They also ate what they raised, as they were dedicated to the idea of caring for the planet. The chores seemed endless, though, and after 15 years of them, the Dunnings finally decided that it was time to devote their energies to other things. Dunning regales readers with some wonderful, funny vignettes, telling of Alexander the ram attempting to mate with every cow in heat or Jack trying to recapture a flyaway turkey. These are counterbalanced by the pall of animals dying while giving birth or getting killed by wolves or farm machinery. The author’s eldest daughter, who was always closest with the animals, is shown to be most affected by their loss: “Everything dies here,” she cried when her dog was tragically killed in a beaver trap. At one point, following an account of the death of a cat, Dunning poignantly muses: “losing animals hadn’t gotten any easier for Erica. It had become troublesomely easy for me, I thought, as I looked at her stricken, tear-stained face.” Although the book generally moves through the years sequentially, it also jumps around a bit, as one memory or another makes its way to the forefront. (Today, all the animals are gone and the fields are now worked by others, but the Dunnings still live on the same land.) Through it all, however, the author insightfully questions her path, juxtaposing her life choices against her expectations of being a “liberated” woman of the 1970s and ’80s: “Our lives create us as much as we create them. Mine created a farm wife, yes. It also created an endless search for self-definition, a conflicted stay-at-home mom, a dreadful businesswoman, and finally, a wordsmith.”
A thoughtful reflection on life, marriage, and child-rearing told from a unique perspective.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-988394-00-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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