A rewarding memoir.
BBC radio producer and writer Dee compresses memorable incidents from his life as a birdwatcher into a one-year excursion.
The author opens with his first memory of seeing a bird—just after his third birthday—and how his delight in these creatures has shaped his life since. Interspersing his observations with nature poetry by Marvell, Pound, Coleridge, Shakespeare and others, Dee begins his journey in June, with a description of a dream in which his task was to launch all the seabirds from the cliffs of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The dream, he writes, was similar to the “dizzyingly, exhilaratingly” real experience of standing on the highest cliffs on Shetland’s coast watching the “wheels and flights of birds.” In July Dee takes us on a walk through woods near Cambridge, where the sight of a woodcock overhead reminds him of the earthy taste of the bird, “a mixture of loam and chalk.” In August the author describes learning to band birds to track their migratory patterns, and how he feels like “Gulliver in Lilliput” holding one in his hand. September brings the “birds’ autumn departures,” a crucial part of “the timetable to [his] life.” In November, Dee recalls a painful boyhood memory: While trying to spot peregrines, the author witnessed a man jump to his death from a bridge. A more pleasant experience occurs in April and May, when the spring weather elicits the “inherently warm” notes of birdsong.
A rewarding memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5933-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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
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