Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky,...
Three titles inaugurate a new series of short paperbacks offering meditations on the author’s face.
The series was inspired by a passage from Jorge Luis Borges, whose parable finds a man establishing his own world “with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” These three book-length essays examine the face as bloodline and lineage, as a mask as permeable as identity. Each is a memoir of sorts, though more of a metaphysical illumination in the case of Ozeki (A Tale for the Time-Being, 2013, etc.), a novelist who is also ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. Hers, titled A Time Code, is the first and longest and is structured as a three-hour meditation of the author looking in the mirror and recording the ruminations that her reflection conjures. Connecting with the inspiration of Borges, she begins with the Zen koan, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” Her face reflects her parentage, as the daughter of an American professor and the Japanese woman with whom he fell in love so shortly after the nations had been enemies. Ozeki remembers her face in girlhood and now contemplates it on the cusp of 60, concluding, “my face is and isn’t me. It’s a nice face. It has lots of people in it.” In Cartography of the Void, Abani (The Secret History of Las Vegas, 2014, etc.) also comes to terms with his mixed parentage—white mother and West African father—as he attempts to resolve his ambivalence toward the latter, whose face is now his. With Strangers on a Pier, Aw offers the most straightforward account—and the one least focused on “the face”—of the immigrant family’s experience as their son was raised in “a traditional Chinese family” before he moved to Britain for an education that launched a literary career (Five Star Billionaire, 2013, etc.).
Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky, philosophical series.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63206-052-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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