A deep-sounding recovery project of memories new and old, fired by years of reflection.
A sometimes sad but seductive collage of memories of two months spent with a Japanese woman and an Inuit elder in Canada’s far north.
In the late summer of 1977, Norman (The Bird Artist, 1994, etc.), who had not then stepped into his novelist’s shoes, went to a town on Hudson Bay in the employ of an American museum to transcribe and translate narratives of the Noah stories. By coincidence, Helen Tanizaki was also there, working on the same stories with the same elder, Mark Nuqac. Tanizaki and Norman were two sides of a coin. She was a sensitive, accomplished ethnographer and translator: introspective, ardent, lucid. He was a befuddled neophyte: agitated, anxious, without poise. Their friendship emerged as they worked to capture and clarify the Noah stories, which were radically different as perceived from the Inuit point of view, on the one hand, and from Norman’s point of view, on the other. Less confusingly, these were stories about the precariousness of life, which reverberated long and hard with the fact that Tanizaki was dying of stomach cancer, and about a stranger in a strange land, which fitted Norman to a T. Now blessed with great poise, Norman twines 11 Noah stories with the landscape of melancholy: his ineptitude, the unforgiving Arctic, the “black butterflies” of Tanizaki’s doom. Though Norman is careful not to get sentimental, something Tanizaki would not have appreciated, readers will find it hard not to fall, as he did, for her talent, her epigrammatic opinions, the freshness of her prayers (“I would like to see / a red phalarope / (please)”) and the elegance of her restraint. Norman may have been in over his head, but he kept his eyes and curiosity open; he engaged, and Tanizaki likely appreciated that very much.
A deep-sounding recovery project of memories new and old, fired by years of reflection.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-86547-680-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
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
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