An annoying saga about a house full of pests.
A naturalist’s memoir of living in an old barn in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.
Meyer’s conservationist views are of the homespun variety. She and her lover, Patrick, purchase an abandoned 75-year-old dairy barn while participating in the reenactment of a pioneer wagon train. The barn is a perfect site for Patrick’s trade (horseshoeing), while the author is thrilled at the thought of writing a memoir about being thrilled with living in the barn, which is full of critters of all different sorts. Meyer and Patrick don’t necessarily want to exterminate the flies, mice, bats, and skunks with whom they share their abode. (When she sets off a pesticide bomb in the barn, killing thousands of flies, she does so against Patrick’s wishes and feels guilty about it.) Rather, the couple learns how to live with the beasts, becoming nouveau–mountain people, learning even to love the smell of skunk musk (which the author finds sexually arousing). Meyer’s reasoning will cause some, if not most, readers to roll their eyes, and her constant shunning of convenience in the interests of nature grows tiresome as the memoir progresses. She convinces herself that killing mice with traps is okay, for example, only because their overwhelming numbers stem from a steady supply of man-made food. She also engages in a personal boycott of products with already-harvested huckleberries because there is a huckleberry shortage and the black bears have little else to eat. Meyer’s heart is in the right place, of course. When a bear cub senselessly dies, we witness a tragedy; hunters have killed its parents and a game warden’s tranquilizers have killed it. But soon after, when Meyer breaks down and writes “I was crying then for myself, crying the pain of impotence in a fast-hurtling world,” her sophistry again rears its ugly head and our sympathy ebbs. Passages devoted to a fishing trip in which Hemingway is invoked also try the patience.
An annoying saga about a house full of pests.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50438-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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