Broad-ranging, introspective, and honest essays that reveal a fine writer’s experiences, mind, and heart.
A novelist and essayist with a peripatetic life returns with a collection of recent and revealing pieces that range from the intensely personal to the analytical to the appreciative.
Xu Xi, who writes in English, has published a number of novels (That Man in Our Lives, 2016) and a memoir (Dear Hong Kong, 2017). Here, she collects 30 tight essays—many previously published—and arranges them, sometimes chronologically, in four categories. Among the most wrenching are those dealing with her mother’s long descent into Alzheimer’s and the author’s care for her (“the typhoon that was my mother’s Alzheimer’s changed my world, shifting all its known compass points”). The author is also candid about her two divorces, her current and long-lasting relationship with another man, and her brother’s death. She also writes affectingly about writing itself: why she writes in English (she says her Chinese is not all that good) and how she, in some ways, disappointed her mother, who did not eagerly approve of her daughter’s decision to become a writer. The author also chronicles a long process of decision about what she should do besides write—something that would earn her a steady, predictable income. She was in the corporate world for a number of years and then moved into academe, where she now works as the co-director of the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In one essay, the author discusses how she likes to “loaf,” but these essays reveal a writer who is intensely focused on her work. There are a few political pieces, as well, including one that features, woven throughout, letters to Hillary Clinton, whom the author supported during the 2016 election. (She zings the winner of that election a few times, too.)
Broad-ranging, introspective, and honest essays that reveal a fine writer’s experiences, mind, and heart.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0682-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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