Occasionally predictable, often lyrical, always intriguing. (1 map, not seen)
Novelist, biographer, and travel-writer Morris (Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, p. 1006, etc.) describes her rustic Welsh home and endeavors to define and celebrate Welsh history, geography, personalities, and Weltanschauung.
Morris has lived for years in what was once a stone stable in a remote area of the remote principality of Wales. She and her partner Elizabeth (the woman Morris married years ago when she was James Morris) converted the building into a cozy home cum library that houses some 8,000 volumes and provides Morris with the resources for her writing and the stability she craves. She calls the house Trefan Morys (partly for the name of the estate to which the building once belonged, partly for the Welsh spelling of her surname). In four swift chapters, Morris composes a love-letter to Wales and to the people who live there—and, of course, to her own home. She writes passionately about the rugged landscape and its sturdy inhabitants and rues the steady incursions of “the dross of television and advertising, drugs, crime, general dumbing-down and sheer ordinariness.” She celebrates the centrality of the kitchen in Welsh homes and culture and praises her neighbors for their reliability and tolerance (she says that they simply pretend her 1972 sex-change operation never happened). Morris teaches us about the meaning of traditional Welsh symbols (the red dragon), about the significance of historical figures (Lloyd George pops in and out like an indecisive guest), and even speculates that America’s Mandan Indians have Welsh ancestry. She does not miss many opportunities to credit the Welsh—but she does miss two: She mentions Lawrence of Arabia without noting he was born in Wales and tells us a bit about Porthmadog without commenting on the nearby Great Embankment that enthralled Percy Bysshe Shelley. Morris is at her best when she examines how Wales has grounded her writing and has at the same time helped her appreciate the mysteries and marvels of the world.
Occasionally predictable, often lyrical, always intriguing. (1 map, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7922-6523-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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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