Evocative essays that delve into the paradoxes of human life.
An English professor blends autobiography with social critiques in this essay collection.
Montgomery’s father built fences for a living, spending his “days removing dirt, adding posts in such a way that erosion or strong wind won’t knock them down.” Indeed, despite her sometimes messy childhood, the author’s father served as the fence post of her life, whose presence represented strength and safety until he contracted cancer. And while she is now an accomplished author and assistant professor at Bridgewater State University, Montgomery still sees herself as a “child,” afraid of the dark future, searching “for anything that will keep me with Daddy longer.” While grief and the raw vulnerability of a daughter who realizes her once invincible father now “exists in darkness” lie at the emotional core of the book, they also set the stage for broader reflections about her childhood and American society and culture. The volume’s autobiographical passages are written in a nonlinear style that jump back and forth across decades and locations, presenting the author’s recollections of her childhood, young adulthood, and relationship with her father in vignettes. Interspersed throughout these snapshots is a biting commentary on contemporary America, as the encroaching darkness of her personal life coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic; ever increasing societal isolation and polarization; and environmental catastrophes spawned by climate change. An extended metaphor of buried treasures, which connects a childhood memory to how humans write their own personal histories, is particularly well executed. “We bury the things we believe will define us after death,” she notes, hoping someday someone will dig them up. “In this way, we write the histories that will prevail.” As the author of multiple books of poetry, Montgomery is a skilled writer whose prose is simultaneously beautiful and tragic, nostalgic and despondent. And while the specific stories are the author’s own, the book taps into universal themes of grappling with complex family dynamics, growing up, leaving and returning home, and confronting death. This is a brilliant, if rather eclectic, collection; readers will hope for a sequel.
Evocative essays that delve into the paradoxes of human life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-952897-25-52
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Split Lip Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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