bookshelf

LETTERS FROM MAX

Name: LETTERS FROM MAX
Author: Sarah Ruhl
ISBN: 978-1-57131-369-0

A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

by Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritvo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2018

A captivating celebration of life and love.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
SMILE
by Sarah Ruhl

- BOOK REVIEW
100 ESSAYS I DON'T HAVE TIME TO WRITE
by Sarah Ruhl

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)