Promising moments, but Utah wilderness lovers will want to stick to Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy.
A sort-of-Mormon tree-hugger wrestles to fit in with her less enlightened neighbors at the end of the world.
Or close to it: Once you leave the civilization of Blanding and Monticello, Utah, and head west up the hill to Cedar Mesa, you’re in the land of juniper trees, Anasazi ruins and ghosts. There Irvine, a champion rock climber and wilderness advocate, having married a like-minded attorney, makes her home early on in the pages of this memoir. There she learns how to negotiate daily life among Mormon cowboys who are inclined to aim their pickups at anyone on a bicycle, assuming—correctly—that only an outsider would choose such transport. Wrestling with demons, chief among them unresolved troubles with her now-deceased but always absent father, Irvine knows how to talk the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. She is inclined to note, for instance, that DNA evidence proves that the Indians and the Hebrews are genetically quite distinct, the Book of Mormon notwithstanding, while advocating grazing controls in overgrazed country whose rancher inhabitants insist that they’re the only real conservationists. There are some well-handled episodes here, as when Irvine wistfully wishes that one of those ranchers would invite her out to his spread for a civilized conversation and a burger: “The rancher will see that I’m not so bad, that perhaps we agree on more than he realized. He’ll promise to talk to other cowboys, tell them the tree-huggers that have come to town aren’t so different after all.” (No such luck.) But there are also some overwrought, and self-important stretches, and too many instances of treading into emotional territory owned by Terry Tempest Williams and Jana Richman, whose Riding in the Shadow of the Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail (2005) better handles the father-daughter conflict in the Mormon context.
Promising moments, but Utah wilderness lovers will want to stick to Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-86547-703-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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