A curious, intensive exploration of the eccentric world of silence and solitude.
A British filmmaker and journalist documents the mysteries of selective speechlessness.
In her affecting debut, Shawcross charts the lives and struggles of people for whom interactive communication has become a virtually insurmountable feat. As a homesick exchange student studying English at the University of California, the author discovered the writings of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet George Oppen. She was fascinated by the fact that he abandoned poetry for more than two decades after serving in World War II. The author also reports on childhood selective mutism, following the unique activity and progress at a New York camp for mute teenagers, and she discusses how menstruation has been tabooed to almost mythical proportions in the mountains of far west Nepal. Shawcross chronicles her time at a Buddhist retreat and her visit with a silent order of nuns in central London where peacefulness is golden and ritualistic: “The…sisters have renounced almost all contact with the world….Their lives are dedicated to prayer.” Shawcross refers often to Oppen’s life and poetry, which serves as a kind of anchor to her narrative. She shares an enlightening interview with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, a project the author participated in. Braided throughout these profiles and stories is Shawcross’ moving personal history. As a child, she’d lost the ability to speak in conversation with others and retreated into her own silent world. This development was spurred by the permanent arrival of her grandmother into the family home and the shame of her father’s sudden unemployment. “I never intended to stop talking….It felt safer, easier somehow, to say the bare minimum,” she writes. Those years of self-imposed pseudo-silence shaped her as a future journalist and a pensive filmmaker but also plagued her romantic relationships with women. Though she slowly found her own voice again in adulthood, the author still admits to experiencing difficulty in saying what she feels even on the brink of marriage, an “alien” but welcome concept to her.
A curious, intensive exploration of the eccentric world of silence and solitude.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-004-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
