As fragile and as haunting as memory itself.
A spare, trembling and troubling memoir of loss from recently widowed novelist and social commentator Roiphe (An Imperfect Lens, 2006, etc.).
Flirting with (but never seriously courting) cliché, the author offers as a principal metaphor the phases of the moon, but readers must resist the urge to roll their eyes at this all-too-familiar friend and instead marvel at the intricate tale she crafts. Its structure is so fine as to be all but invisible, and each word seems like the individual beat of a human heart. Using the present—that most gossamer of tenses—throughout, she tells a series of stories about herself and her deceased husband, identified only as H. Eventually, we learn a number of things about him: He read and reread the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope; he loved Mozart and the Dutch masters. He touched his wife often, always used his key at the front door. We learn, too, about her family: her first marriage, her daughters, an estrangement from a nephew that death and time are healing. Nearing 70, the author wonders if she needs another man in her life. She tries online-dating services and relates meetings with men whose failures to be her lost husband she describes most affectingly. One persistent e-mail correspondent continually sends her pages of right-wing paranoia, yet she remains attracted to him for a long time—longer, she knows, than sense should have allowed. She recalls old friendships, examines closely the dying of the light, decides to catalog the imperfections of her husband but can criticize only his erratic driving and, worst of all, his dying. She gives away his clothes but can’t decide what to do with his neckties. Her occasional flashbacks to the emergency room and the funeral are bright bursts of painful light.
As fragile and as haunting as memory itself.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125462-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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