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STRANGE PARADISE

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.

A poet reflects on her long marriage and struggle to define her own career.

In a graceful, engaging memoir, Schulman (English/Baruch Coll., CUNY; Without a Claim, 2013, etc.)—former poetry editor of the Nation, director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and winner of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry—writes candidly about her marriage to virologist Jerome Schulman, her literary aspirations, and her grief following her husband’s recent death. She takes her title from lines by Marianne Moore, describing marriage as “that strange paradise / unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings / the choicest part of my life.” Schulman met Moore when she was 14, the beginning of a warm friendship. She edited an authorized edition of Moore’s poems and focused on her work in her doctoral dissertation. Many other poets, writers, and artists make appearances as Schulman recounts the trajectory of her career. These include novelist Richard Yates; poets W.S. Merwin, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott; critic Irving Howe; and many of the acclaimed writers—e.g., James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Octavio Paz—Schulman invited to the 92nd Street Y. Much of the memoir focuses less on her marriage than her achievements in the literary world. Schulman married reluctantly, fearful of giving up her independence, but her husband never failed in encouraging her to write and submit her work for publication; she chafed, though, at being dependent on his income as she embarked on her career, and her resentment “seeped into our marriage like smoke.” With their discovery of Jerome’s infertility and their inability to talk frankly about adoption, the marriage foundered, leading to a 10-year separation. “My marriage,” she admits, “has been a feast of contradiction: radiance and dissatisfaction; intense loyalties and devastating treacheries; freedom and the sacrifice, albeit willing, of independence; excitement and a kind of pleasant boredom.” They reunited only to then face Jerome’s illness and a heart attack, followed by years of suffering and deterioration.

An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-885983-52-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Turtle Point

Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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