In the disappointing third volume of her autobiography (Farewell Happy Fields, 1977; The Land Unknown, 1975), the renowned English poet and scholar reflects upon the last years of her life, as viewed through the prism of India. Raine was 74 when she first visited India but she immediately felt as if she had come ``home.'' She writes both of the interior ``India of the Imagination''—``the place of every arrival, the term of every spiritual quest''—and of the exterior India, a land of ``sculptures and temples and dance and marvelous clothes and jewels and paper birds and garlands of stephanotis and marigolds offered to gods without number.'' It is the ``India of the Imagination'' that Raine treasures most, and yet when discussing spiritual matters, she is either disappointingly dense and obscure or else obvious and facile; there are very few moments of insight here. Raine also has the annoying habits of dropping names that will mean little to most readers (her descriptions of the many conferences she attends are particularly stultifying) and of coyly putting herself down (``I have never been sure that I had the right to be a poet''). Only when she turns to physical descriptions of India does her prose truly come to life. Some of her observations are resonant with beauty; they reveal a deep feeling for India, spiritual or otherwise, that eludes her elsewhere (``We were served...by a beautiful grave little boy with a ragged turban who poured our water for us like Ganymede himself, and served the lime pickle with his fingers''). Though there are many poetic moments scattered throughout, much is sluggish and opaquely esoteric, resulting in self-absorbed work likely to appeal primarily to Raine fans.
Pub Date: Aug. 13, 1991
ISBN: 0-8076-1268-5
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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