A journey that pays dividends, both for poet-wanderer Armitage and for readers.
Award-winning poet Armitage (Poetry/Univ. of Sheffield; Seeing Stars, 2011, etc.) does what poets sometimes do: takes a walk, observes keenly and reports.
In the author’s case, the walk was more than a shuffle about the Lake District, but rather a long haul down the Pennine Way, more than 250 miles, and three weeks, from Scotland to his home in the Midlands. It also meant heavy weather, for “down” the Pennine Way means into the prevailing wind and rain, which, along this backbone of England, isn’t to be trifled with. Though he is occasionally wry and playful, the Way is a serious ramble, capable of swallowing up travelers in the boggy mists and moorlands. Armitage plays the troubadour, giving poetry readings each night for room and board and rounds of drinks (“it’s basically 256 miles of begging”). It comes as little surprise that the author studied geography, for he displays a sharp appreciation of place, both in its unique contours and its mystery—at one point, he mulls the possibility that “recollections can inhabit or cling to places…[s]o we shouldn’t be surprised when we feel the atmosphere of a battleground or graveyard.” Armitage is also adept at compressed expression, doling out small stories—about the people he walks with or the history of the landscape, the misery of midges or the terror of a deep fog high in the Uplands—that flash like sun on chrome.
A journey that pays dividends, both for poet-wanderer Armitage and for readers.Pub Date: March 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-416-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
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