A moving exploration of widowhood.
Crocker’s memoir about her decision to disinter the coffin where she buried her husband’s letters 40 years earlier, after his death in Vietnam.
In 1969, when Crocker (The Secret Life of Louisa May Alcott, 2013) was 23, her husband Dave was killed in the Vietnam War. They had been married for three years. Distraught, the widow decided that she would not bury his remains but scatter his ashes on the north face of the Eiger, a difficult slope Dave had longed to climb. She placed his letters and photographs, her wedding dress and his Army uniform inside his coffin. The funeral director told her, “Just remember you can’t dig this up. This is permanent.” Crocker was glad to let these memories rest for four decades, until, she writes, “I simply changed my mind.” In 2011, Crocker had the coffin disinterred. She describes this process in the first chapter but leaves readers on the brink of discovering what was inside until the book’s final pages. Since the intervening chapters don’t quote from any of those letters, the final revelation may be anticlimactic. The real focus isn’t on the drama of disinterment but on Crocker’s buried memories, too painful to look at for so many years. With thoughtfulness and grace, she reconstructs the young woman she was (and the family she came from), how she met Dave, what kind of man he was—universally admired and beloved, according to all who served with or met him—being a young military wife, early widowhood, the experience of grief and how she slowly recovered. Her decades-later camaraderie with Dave’s fellow soldiers becomes especially healing. Crocker turns a nice phrase; she says after her husband’s funeral, “The house was jammed with sadness, packed solid with the smother of something terrible.” Some moments (opening the coffin, arriving at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), however, are elongated in a way that doesn’t create suspense, just impatience.
A moving exploration of widowhood.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940863-00-9
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Elm Grove
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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