A winning collection—think of it as an extra slice of pie set aside for mom.
Thirty-one essays by mothers and daughters, refracting the light of motherhood in unusual and beautiful directions.
“Every day should be Mother’s Day.” That’s what many mothers say every year, and correctly. Mothers, mamas, moms—they give more of themselves than is reasonable. “A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie,” said Tenneva Jordan, a woman famous primarily for that statement. There are entire libraries’ worth of books about mothers, which include quotations, aphorisms, devotionals and essays. This collection, edited by novelist Benedict (Almost, 2001, etc.), would likely be shelved with those many others, but it deserves a place front and center. Contributors include a mix of well-known writers (Ann Hood, Mary Gordon, Elinor Lipman, Joyce Carol Oates, Roxana Robinson, etc.) with others still on the rise. Oates writes about a quilt passed down through the years. Emma Straub chronicles a cruise gifted to her by her mother; she describes it as “the maritime version of No Exit.” Maud Newton writes about how she and her mother circle each other warily, their orbits held by a love of literature. Other contributors include Elissa Schappell, Marge Piercy, Luanne Rice, Eleanor Clift, Lisa See and Margo Jefferson, and all contribute thoughtful, unexpected and fresh takes on their mothers and daughters. “Each of the contributors,” writes Benedict in the introduction, “describes a gift from her mother—three-dimensional, experiential, a work habit, a habit of being, a way of seeing the world—that magically, movingly reveals the story of her mother and of their relationship.”
A winning collection—think of it as an extra slice of pie set aside for mom.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-135-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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