A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it.
A sharply observed, occasionally overwritten collection of essays on the interrelationships of man and nature, of soul and place.
Born in Britain and raised in Canada, Hoffman now lives in and often writes of the Balkans, near the Prespa Lakes, a region of natural splendor and deep political divisions. He and his partner “were led to this Greek village by a book. Having read a glowing review of it in a bird-watching magazine, we bought the book on the off chance that we might someday visit the region it described. But it took only a single evening of leafing through its pages, reading passages aloud, and looking at photographs to reach a decision of far greater import…it captivated us from the start.” An impetuous romantic, the author also came to love that particular place, and here, he shares that love, as well as his love of books about places, for he seems to connect with nature from a particularly literary perspective. He writes of “the resonance of place,” “the environmental vicissitudes of place,” and the feeling that “there are no clean, easy lines that connect ourselves to a place, as if we were joining up a question with its answer in a beginner’s language book.” More compelling than such grand pronouncements and conceptual conceits are the specifics of experience and detail, the wonder Hoffman finds in this seemingly insignificant woods, in the cry of this bird or the stateliness of that tree, and the exhilaration he feels as he experiences life as part of the natural world: “The places where I can look up or out, either at the vast ceiling of cloud and sky, or the disappearing horizon, and feel more or less the same thing: the inconsequential scale of our lives. Paradoxically, it is in those places that I feel most alive, experiencing a wild and shuddering depth to existence.”
A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4556-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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