A delightful exploration of childhood fantasy, rudely awakened by reality.
Barlow, the son of a Kansas farmer, escapes into a wonderful world of daydreams in this promising debut memoir.
At age 10, Barlow had little to smile about. Struck down by polio, he spent his time convalescing in a hospital, sharing his hopes and dreams with his young friend, Tim, a fellow patient who later died. The neighborhood kids pushed him around in his wheelchair after he went home—until they grow bored and started to call him names. Woody eventually recovered from polio, only to be diagnosed with a lazy eye that required a complex operation. Confronted by adversity at every turn, the young boy found solace in the landscape surrounding his father’s farm in Olathe, Kan., on the outskirts of Kansas City, Mo. Woody explored back roads on his bicycle and imagined himself as a Wild West gunslinger fighting off Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. At other times, he hung ropes from trees in his yard and became Tarzan, swinging from branch to branch. He pretended that an old woman in town was an evil storybook witch whose powers had to be neutralized, and set about formulating an elaborate plan to bring her to justice. Woody’s daydreams challenged the drudgery of his everyday life, but as he grew older the demands of adulthood bore down on him. He was mystified by women and sex, and strove for some amount of financial independence in the hope of buying a car. His dream world began to dissipate, and, in turn, the memoir loses some of its playful charm; the blunt pain of reality is hammered home when Woody, working a shift at the bowling alley, hears the announcement of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The author delivers his narrative in an affable, laid-back style with a distinctive wry wit. Throughout, the memoir successfully channels and finds catharsis in a land of make-believe often lost to adults. Unfortunately, the book loses its way, or perhaps its heart, in its latter portion when recalling Woody’s unremarkable adolescence.
A delightful exploration of childhood fantasy, rudely awakened by reality.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490952482
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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