Easiest to digest in snack-size portions.
Memories of a Michigan upbringing proceed to anecdotes on retirement in Italy, as a writing professor writes what pleases him, which is often about what doesn’t.
In this collection of short essays, Bailey (Emeritus, English/Henry Ford Coll.; co-editor: The Creative Writer's Craft: Lessons in Poetry, Fiction, and Drama, 1999, etc.) skips back and forth across time and place. Many of these pieces have been published in literary journals and small magazines, and they weren’t necessarily intended (or sequenced) to be read as a whole. However, there are certain themes that pervade throughout. Some touch on mankind as part of nature and apart from it: “The outhouse was where man met beast, and the beast was himself.” Some decry the ways that regional differences (especially in food) have given way to cultural homogenization. “Much of the United States looks like Ohio warmed over,” he writes in the concluding title essay. “Pull off the freeway...and you’ll see the same thing. When you pass the Bed Bath and Beyond, you’ll know that Chili’s is not far away.” Bailey writes of flip-flops and sweatpants, of the idiosyncratic differences that a long, loving marriage encompasses, and of living in the very different cultures of the Midwest and of Italy, land of his wife’s familial ancestors, where both of them feel comfortable. He writes of dreams, nightmares, and memories while recognizing of the last that “memory is capricious, frequently a liar.” If readers identify with what he writes, that’s fine, but one never gets the sense that he’s writing for anyone but himself and that his essays represent the written equivalent of thinking out loud—or musing, wryly and wistfully. Maybe he writes because that’s what academics do, write to publish, and because that’s what writers do, observe to write.
Easiest to digest in snack-size portions.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0119-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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