Resonant reflections from a skilled literary artist.
A novelist muses on maturing, seeking, traveling, and other themes in this collection of fiction and nonfiction.
Rolnick (Cocoon of Cancer, 2016, etc.) offers 23 essays and stories she calls “tattles,” in which she says she has “blurred the lines of nonfiction and fiction, truth and imagination.” The pieces vary in length from a couple of pages to more than 40, and they’re organized in thematic sections—“Seeking,” “Childhood,” “Maturing,” “A-Musings,” and “Travels.” Each piece is preceded by an italicized summary of its contents. The essays range from “Foundations,” a riff on the importance—and symbolic significance—of finding a well-fitting bra, to “Joy,” Rolnick’s embrace of the titular emotion that she says “creates the wisdom and laughter that will sustain me for another half century.” Fictional imaginings include “Lace,” in which a divorcée, Rose, seeks healing on her trip to a remote Caribbean island; “Mad Matter,” in which Sarah, a cancer survivor, meets a perceptive child and an attractive, mourning fireman; and “New Order,” about an orphaned teenager’s move to her estranged uncle’s home in Florida. The challenges of aging figure prominently in two stories: “Knock, Knock” shares the tale of Selma, who’s dealing with the dementia of her longtime husband, whose thoughts appear in italicized segments throughout the narrative, and “Country Villa,” about a woman visiting her father, Morton, in a nursing home. As often occurs with these types of compilations, the “tattles” collected here are a mixed bag. The most memorable entries are those that skew toward fiction; “Lace” is a particularly lovely example of Rolnick’s mastery at conjuring images of such things as handmade lace and deep-sea diving, which highlight the allure of travel. The essays, while engaging, tend to tread more familiar ground, such as post-divorce dating, and it’s occasionally challenging to keep track of the author’s autobiographical details. Overall, however, Rolnick offers many observational gems to enjoy.
Resonant reflections from a skilled literary artist.Pub Date: June 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9845119-5-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Sedro Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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