A moving tribute, unsparingly honest. The harrowing close is almost unreadable.
Intimate, excruciating memoir of the life and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, by prolific author Hall.
Hall (Willow Temple, 2003, etc.) segments his story into periods of the couple’s 23-year marriage, starting from Kenyon’s terrible early death from leukemia in April 1995 and reaching back to their first in meeting, in 1969, at the University of Michigan, where Hall taught literature and Kenyon, more than 20 years younger, was a student and fledgling poet. Most of their married life was spent rustically at the Hall’s family farm in Wilmot, N.H., where the two cultivated gardens, wrote poetry, worked freelance and experienced a kind of reclusive solidarity next to each other. Curiously, their harmonious life of poetry was documented only the year before Kenyon’s death by Bill Moyers in the PBS broadcast A Life Together. But Kenyon’s diagnosis with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) changed everything, and she underwent immediate and devastating chemotherapy, a steady infusion of poisons and drugs through her Hickman incision, intractable pain and enervating side effects, such as dementia and depression, that compounded her existing depression. The prognosis is poor for a woman of 46 (ALL usually strikes children), and Kenyon endured an agonizing bone marrow transplant in Seattle from an anonymous donor (whom Hall later met). For 15 months, the inseparable couple battled the disease raging in Kenyon’s blood: Hall depicts their kinship poignantly, sparing few details of human fragility and debilitation. The days of Kenyon’s virtual imprisonment inside a sterile cell (her LAF room, for “laminar air flow”), while she was pumped with a steady flow of poisonous Cytoxan, reads like a scene in a death chamber. “Rarely, during LAF, could I do something useful for Jane,” Hall laments. In alternating chapters, he portrays the creative, peaceful life the two carved out for themselves, both of them dedicated to their craft.
A moving tribute, unsparingly honest. The harrowing close is almost unreadable.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-47801-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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