A captivating celebration of life and love.
A Yale professor and her playwriting student forge an extraordinary friendship.
In a tender, intimate memoir, award-winning playwright Ruhl (100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, 2014, etc.) honors the life and remarkable mind of Max Ritvo (Four Reincarnations: Poems, 2016, etc.), a poet of exceptional grace and insight who died in 2016 at the age of 25. When Ritvo walked into Ruhl’s classroom in 2012, he seemed markedly more mature than her other students: “Some rarefied combination of a young Mike Nichols and an old John Keats, he seemed eighty years old and not of this century.” In remission from a rare cancer that had been diagnosed when he was in high school, Ritvo soon wrote to Ruhl that the cancer had returned. In the next four years, he underwent multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, experimental treatments, and radiation, all the while graduating from Yale, completing an MFA program at Columbia, marrying, giving exuberant poetry readings, and publishing his work to great acclaim. Wracked by suffering, facing death, and immersed in writing, Ritvo deepened his friendship with Ruhl, reflected in the letters, emails, and poems that they shared and which Ruhl has selected for this deeply moving, often heartbreaking volume. It is testimony both to the evolution of their friendship and to a wise and passionate young man. “Max,” writes the author, “had a wild gift of eloquence; he married this gift with his singular gift for listening.” A year into their relationship, the two decided to write letters “in a more self-conscious way,” hoping to collect them into a book. Thoughts about spirit, God, identity, the meaning of an afterlife, and, especially, grief, recur as Max moved closer to death. “I do believe consciousness persists,” Ruhl wrote to Max; something of the soul “travels and arrives somewhere.” Suffering from “overwhelming bodily discomfort,” Max admits, he could use a God who would “maybe start to care enough to intervene.” Maybe, he adds later, “my grief and your inspired calm are part of a greater consciousness.”
A captivating celebration of life and love.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57131-369-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
