Given the autobiographical design of the collection, it may seem churlish to attack the book for going where the author so...
Memoirist and novelist Harrison (Creative Writing/Hunter Coll.; Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, 2014, etc.) again taps the well of her personal life for a series of essays dealing with long-standing preoccupations and compulsive navel-gazing, the result being an alternately compelling and uncomfortable reading experience.
While many readers will sympathize with the author, admiring her candor, courage, and flashes of excellent writing, these pieces will connect most strongly with readers as neurotic as she is—those prone to hand-wringing, crying jags, and obsessing, sometimes for decades, over the same, possibly unresolvable issues. For Harrison, writing is not merely catharsis, but dissection, a meticulous reading of the entrails of her experiences. Memory is the linchpin of the book, but the author is smart enough to know that memory is unreliable. In piece after piece, Harrison revisits (and re-evaluates) her anguish and confusion over her resentful young mother, a manipulative father (the author chronicled her incestuous relationship with him in The Kiss), her emotionally insatiable grandmother, the death of her much-loved father-in-law, and her fascination with Joan of Arc. The author also explores the joys of a happy marriage and the pleasures of raising three children, but it is the pain that lingers. Harrison is at her best in such essays as the moving “Mini-Me” and the incisive “The Forest of Memory,” while the title essay offers what is perhaps the most interesting weave: luridly macabre imagination twined with real-life experience.
Given the autobiographical design of the collection, it may seem churlish to attack the book for going where the author so often has gone before; yet Harrison is self-aware to the point of self-absorption and self-effacing to a fault. However, the author’s intelligence shines, and these ruminations may encourage some to confront their own anxieties.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6348-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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