A meandering journal of novelist Grumbach's 74th year that chronicles a final move from Washington, D.C., to the coast of Maine, and that includes brief, often charming, reflections on such diverse topics as mayflies, oxymorons, authors, and death. A follow-up to Coming into the End Zone (1991), which recounted Grumbach's ``intensely despondent'' 71st year, these month-by-month notes seek to examine whether the author's despair has lifted—and whether ``I may come upon some answers to the insistent questions of old age. Or perhaps only succeed in recording the minor thoughts and activities in the life of an aging woman.'' Grumbach begins her journal year with the publication of End Zone and ends it with a ``meditation'' on home, in particular her home in Maine, where she's found ``an interior landscape of serenity, isolation and solitude'' and has become less ``grumpy.'' In between, she offers snippets from La Rochefoucauld, Emerson, Anatole Broyard, and others; descriptions of life in Maine; accounts of her speeches, meetings, and book signings along the Maine/Washington corridor; entertaining anecdotes about the famous and not-so-famous; glimpses of family matters, centered around a daughter's cancer; a musing on love—all nuggets from which novelists craft their tales, but here unconnected and unshaped. Grumbach's work here will inevitably be compared to that of her friend May Sarton: Both are novelists removed to Maine, both are publishing journals on aging. Grumbach, however—probably because she's relatively younger, healthier, and more active than Sarton- -offers an account that's livelier, more wide-ranging, and less self-absorbed, though not much more profound. Written with polish and erudition, here are some budding insights into—but no answers to—the questions of old age.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03541-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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