A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.
A fleshed-out diary of a year spent on an island—man, woman, child, dogs—that, in its reflection of the quotidian, isn’t always totally engaging.
With a piece of the cash from his bestselling My Old Man and the Sea (1995), Hays purchased an island off the Canadian coast, 50 acres of unedited earth surrounded by the North Atlantic. It’s a place, as Hays tells it in his plainspoken, intelligent voice, to escape civilization, a wild land where he can find himself. Except now he has a wife and Stephan, her 11-year-old son, with all that age’s bright and dim spots. So what Hays must do is find himself within the matrix of family as he basks in the glory of the island landscape, a task he chronicles in this catalogue of days. Much of the material, though nicely shaped, is simply a recounting of activities: putting up wood for winter (though how they burn all that unseasoned wood is a mystery), making a dock, building and rebuilding all the stuff they need (and, killing time, don’t need: “Now comes the really stupid part: having forgotten why I am putting an unneeded shelf nowhere useful”). There is the process of getting to know Stephan, perhaps the most captivating aspect of the story, and the incessant bickering with his wife, perhaps the least captivating, though certainly the most pervasive. The island itself, which appears in fits and starts throughout the narrative, is an enigma—its heart an impenetrable spruce thicket—and readers must accept Hays’s love of the place rather than share it. What does come intensely across are those blood-red skies, all that weather, shrieking winds, stormy seas, and bell-clear days.
A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-345-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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