An unabashed, candid memoir that continually entertains and educates.
Lutwick recounts being 22 years old and finding love while based at a Fijian outpost of the Peace Corps.
It was 1968, and Lutwick had graduated from the University of Michigan with an MBA. Unable to find work in corporate America, the author stumbled into the Peace Corps. He was sent to Fiji, where he faced an unlikely battle of his own: a taboo love affair. At that time in the Fiji Islands, an Indian woman caught having sexual relations with a non-Indian man, or any man other than her husband, could face death at the hands of her own people. Despite the risks, Lutwick fell in love with Rani, an Indian woman who worked in the same office. They carried on an illicit affair, beating the odds of social convention. In his beautifully written memoir, Lutwick interweaves hilarious childhood anecdotes with sadder commentaries of his life. His parents died within two years of each other, leaving him orphaned at the age of 10. Jewish, he also endured anti-Semitic bullying until he fought back one day, hurling his offender across a classroom and into the blackboard. He relays these memories with neither bitterness nor self-serving pity—just a good dose of humor and intelligence. The author balances these reflections with those of an older self navigating first love within the confines of unwritten, but strict, cultural decrees. Meanwhile, he shares thoughtful insight into Fiji’s exotic history and society, as seen by an ineffectual, scrappy Peace Corps volunteer with a lot to learn. Lutwick is also not shy about detailing his hedonistic mindset as a 22-year-old. The ridiculous lengths that he and his friend go to get high—ingesting huge amounts of nutmeg, for example—are off-the-charts hysterical.
An unabashed, candid memoir that continually entertains and educates.Pub Date: May 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1935925118
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.
Steele assembles the long-lost memoirs of the “Queen of Magic,” a once-famous, nearly forgotten female magician.
Aside from Harry Houdini, few magicians from the golden age of magic have any contemporary name recognition—and any that do are men. Yet around the turn of the 20th century, Adelaide Herrmann held her own as a popular female magician. But because magic’s allure waned as the century wore on, few remember her. Enter Steele, a magician and Herrmann fan, who also performed tributes to the late magician. After acquiring Herrmann’s missing memoir in 2010 after it was discovered in a descendant’s closet, Steele edited it for this publication, a compilation of the memoirs along with an impressive selection of photographs, magazine articles and other ephemera. The memoir itself is compelling—it tells of her early life as a dancer and her falling in love with renowned magician Alexander Herrmann—although Steele notes that Herrmann “wasn’t above occasionally re-casting herself into anecdotes that had originally starred her husband. As much as I adore her, I don’t always trust her.” Alexander received all the attention during his life, and when he died, his nephew Leon briefly took over the act but proved ill-suited for the role. Herrmann next stepped up and made the show her own. She traveled across the United States and Europe, encountering floods and fires and often performing the “bullet catch” trick. It’s a fun story improved by Steele’s peppering the text with photographs to illustrate Herrmann’s text, giving the book the feeling of a well-loved scrapbook. The additional ephemera at the back of the book features writing about Herrmann’s costumes, articles Herrmann wrote for magazines about her job and numerous mentions of her in the press.
A must-own for fans of magic, Steele’s book is a fun peek into the history of magic’s golden age.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1883647216
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.
Exuberant, uncensored and wise free verse informed by a benevolent relativism and populated with social outcasts.
Hill’s poems may surface from the depths of a savage city, but savage is hardly the adjective that comes to mind when reading them. Rendered in careful but vibrant language and filtered through Hill’s gently self-deprecating wit, even the grittiest of his poems evince a nonjudgmental candor and a tender concern for human foibles. East St. Louis pervades these poems, not merely as a setting, but as a sort of code, a paradigm and sometimes as a character itself. East St. Louis is the place to find a one-legged prostitute for $10; “a city of immorality and deception / where looking at the wrong woman / can get you killed” and “[taking] one in the leg” is just part of “an ordinary night.” Yet it’s also the place where “taxes are lower” and “people got soul,” where “Glamorous Candy” will pull you into the bathroom and “make life interesting.” Here, you’re part of “a dangerous, exciting, chaotic place.” Hill’s characters are not characters in East St. Louis; they’re characters because of East St. Louis. In fact, amid the scattered topics this collection covers, the one steady theme is the essentialness of context, which Hill explicitly addresses in “Fritangas,” a poem about a Colombian street food, a “beautiful food that comes / with children and dogs and flies / with dirt and smoke / with grease and hoke.” However, when the mayor attempts to clean up the street vendor operations—no “dogs and flies, / no dirt, no smoke, / no grease, no hoke”—the decontextualized fritangas “taste simply awful…clean as a virgin’s kiss.” Comparisons to Bukowski and his dedication to the down-and-out of Los Angeles are inevitable and accurate; Bukowski fans will be hooked immediately. Undeniable, too, is the Beat influence—jazzy rhythms and narrational confessions that echo Gregory Corso, or the long-lined, epic free verse shot through with barely contained eroticism and Eastern religious figures that calls Ginsburg to mind. Hill’s strengths are as varied as his topics. He has the eye and the sensitivity to convey a raw experience without compromise or condescension.
Intoxicatingly fun; disturbing yet hopeful.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1448970087
Page Count: 118
Publisher: PublishAmerica
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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