by Randy Turk ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
This book is more of a monochromatic mural than a multicolored tapestry, but it still captures the effects of social change...
Turk travels the back roads of 36 states in search of “the living story of rural America.”
The author, a former educational leadership professor at Wichita State University, follows in the footsteps of such luminaries as Charles Kuralt and William Least Heat-Moon in this sometimes-engaging, if repetitive, account of 16 months of travels around the back roads of America with Mo, his golden retriever. He comes from a farming family, and he set out to chronicle “the living story of rural America” by interviewing people he encountered on the road. “If our family history is connected by stories,” then the “history of rural America is linked by the stories of their residents,” he writes. Rural America, of course, has been undergoing profound social and economic change, as Turk notes—“Today, three out four rural counties no longer depend on agriculture as their primary economic base”—and his stories of more than 100 people provide a window into that transformation. “American Falls is dying off,” lamented a resident of that small, southeast Idaho town, while an interviewee in Osage, Missouri, said that the only businesses left in town were mostly “antique stores....We don’t have anything anymore.” In Buena Vista, Virginia, an old-timer said that the loss of businesses and other changes “have made it difficult to promote our legacy as an old town of the South.” Even so, Turk doesn’t excessively dwell on the negative, as he also extols the community spirit of small-town America and uncovers such success stories as Las Vegas, New Mexico, a once “semi-segregated” community where a Hispanic resident told him, “I never thought forty years ago [that] an Anglo would be asking me my opinion on anything.” He also enlivens the text with the imaginary musings of his dog, Mo, such as, “I am so bored that I do not even want to ask for a dawg bone.” Readers, though, may experience a similar emotion, as the author doesn’t have the prose skills to really bring characters he meets to life, resulting in an often monotonous portrait of rural America. However, he has, at the very least, provided a worthwhile contribution to making that part of America “recognizable to future generations.”
This book is more of a monochromatic mural than a multicolored tapestry, but it still captures the effects of social change on rural communities.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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