LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

Name: LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
Author: Leigh Stein
ISBN: 978-1-101-98267-9

by Leigh Stein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Stein’s compelling, sincere voice emerges full strength from this illuminating, soul-searching story of an emotionally...

bookshelf

A novelist and poet explores her role in a destructive relationship.

Jason looked like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, writes former New Yorker staff member Stein (The Fallback Plan, 2012, etc.), and she fell hard. That’s when the trouble began. In this memoir of loss and yearning, the author chronicles how she had moved on to a successful writing career and a new romance when she learned of Jason’s death in a motorcycle accident. Along with the news came painful memories and unanswered questions. She wondered why their lives were “so inseparably intertwined” and why she “went back to him so many times when his behavior should have kept me way.” They were young and at loose ends, and she had fallen in love with his passion, rebellious nature, and adventurous spirit, ignoring her sense that something was wrong. The warning signs were there: his cruel teasing, deceptions, manipulation, put-downs, and unstable behavior. Her mother, a psychologist, called out Jason’s “ ‘game’ as manipulative and controlling, a way to put [the author] in her place.” Stein never knew who was going to show up: the “charming, hardworking” Jason or the “surprisingly, memorably cruel” Jason. When she agreed to move with him away from family and friends to Albuquerque, the “Land of Enchantment,” it was emblematic of their cinematic dream world: “We had matching leather jackets for when we rode through the desert, two silhouettes against the night.” But the dream faded out, and a quagmire of obsessive love, recklessness, betrayal, and abuse faded in. Stein lost herself in the “heavily medicated fog” of depression, but she eventually garnered strength and courage reading about strong, independent women—e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe—and found her way out through writing. Some of the narrative is disturbing, but the author’s artful writing and intense—occasionally overly intense—self-examination and willingness to expose her vulnerabilities hold sway.

Stein’s compelling, sincere voice emerges full strength from this illuminating, soul-searching story of an emotionally crippling romance.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-98267-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Plume

Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.