bookshelf

TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST

Name: TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST
Author: Alexandra Fuller
ISBN: 978-1-59420-674-0

by Alexandra Fuller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2019

Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.

bookshelf

A memoirist reflects on the lessons of her father, a man with an insatiable lust for life.

“ ‘Travel light,’ my father always said. ‘Move fast,’ ” writes Fuller (Quiet Until the Thaw, 2017, etc.). “He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion.” The author’s anecdotal tribute to her late father brims with snippets and snatches of Tim Fuller’s whirlwind lifestyle. The first part of the narrative covers their time in Budapest, where she and her mother watched as Tim, stricken with pneumonia, died in a hospital bed. As the text progresses, Fuller peels back layer after layer of the character of her father, a highly textured world traveler who navigated life using his own compass. Leaving his native Britain behind, he set out to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War. After meeting his true love and having two daughters, they settled in Zambia, where Tim acquired a banana plantation along the Zambezi River. The author ably chronicles this tumultuous transition era, with its constantly changing governments and economic instability. But at its heart, the book is an intimate character study of a spontaneity-loving wild man who, in his younger years, amused himself swerving his car toward the “do-gooder” foreign aid workers and clearing life’s hurdles with a good smoke and a whiskey double. “For him, everything was about time,” she writes, “burning through it the way he did.” Over the decades, the wily expat continued etching his colorful legend into Zambezi Valley lore as the author made off for America, now a traveler in her own right. Tasked to come to terms with his physical absence, she sifted through a lifetime of memories in order to pen this celebration of the man whose profound influence helped shape her own worldview. Fuller writes gracefully about embracing grief as an indelible part of the human experience.

Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.

Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-59420-674-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
FI
by Alexandra Fuller

- BOOK REVIEW
QUIET UNTIL THE THAW
by Alexandra Fuller

- BOOK REVIEW
LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME
by Alexandra Fuller

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.