by Rena Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A pensive novel about emotional and physical displacement.
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In Lee’s (A Bed on Nine Legs, 2013, etc.) novel, an Israeli expatriate explores her memories across distances of geography and time.
Lily Katz is an Israeli-American living a comfortable life with her longtime husband, Adam, in New York City. When a letter unexpectedly arrives from Amos, a man with whom she had an affair while living in Kenya in the late 1960s, the floodgates of Lily’s memory open. She devotes herself to writing a memoir. In a winding, nonsequential narrative, Lily explores her life, from her school days in Israel to the present day. Lily, Adam, and their two young children live in Kenya during the Six-Day War and watch helplessly from another continent as their beloved nation of Israel comes under attack. After Adam’s professional life in Africa falls apart, the family relocates to the United States. The move is meant to be temporary, but as Adam begins to experience success as an engineer and the family puts down roots in Queens, it becomes permanent. Lily comes to think of herself as, “Not a true Israeli, neither a true American.” Her family and friends in Israel and Kenya exist strongly in her memory but have nothing to do with her new life in America. On her visits to Israel, she finds herself increasingly distanced from her home country: “Could a street too age, she wondered, finding that even her parents’ street, like its inhabitants, had greatly aged.” Lee segues from a close third-person perspective to Lily’s first-person voice, a technique that comments on how memory distances a person from the self. Indeed, the novel is far less about the events of Lily’s life than about the way she remembers these events and their associated people and places. The detailed summary and examination of every change in Lily’s life may prove a bit languid for some readers. That said, the secrets surrounding the circumstances of Amos and Lily’s affair create strong narrative tension. More interesting than the interpersonal relationship, though, is the way that Lee presents the relationship between writing and memory.
A pensive novel about emotional and physical displacement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5120-6592-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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