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LEANING INTO THE WIND

Name: LEANING INTO THE WIND
Author: Linda Hasselstrom
ISBN: 0-395-83738-3

WOMEN WRITE FROM THE HEART OF THE WEST

edited by Linda Hasselstrom & Gaydell Collier & Nancy Curtis ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1997

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Essays, stories, poems, and a few recipes by women from the High Plains. Some years ago memoirist Hasselstrom, librarian/horsewoman Collier, and publisher Curtis, residents of Wyoming, put out a call throughout the northern plains, asking for ``authentic'' and ``clear'' views of women's lives there. Their emphasis was particularly on the authentic: Protesting perhaps a little too much, they opine that the West has been popularized to the point where ``a New York stockbroker slips on pointy-toed boots in psychedelic colors to dine with a lady in a fringed skirt and mocassins,'' and real cowpokes are ashamed to be seen wearing cowboy hats for fear they'll be mistaken for these poseurs. They've turned up plenty of authentic work here. The collection suffers only from a predictable level of repetition, inasmuch as many of the 125 contributors (including teachers, housewives, cattle and sheep ranchers, and writers) turn to the same themes: the loneliness of ranch life, the smell of new-mown hay, the bitterness of an Alberta Clipper wind in the thick of winter. For all the sameness, though, many of the pieces—few by previously published writers—are very fine, among them NellieWesterskow's remembrance of her first year of marriage, in 1921, when she and her husband were so poor they ``had to share the only fork until Nels found another at an abandoned homestead when he was out riding.'' Garnet Perman's ``Evolution of a Country Woman'' is a good-natured enumeration of all the things that a ranch wife has to know (such as the fact that ``sheep have an IQ three points below that of wormwood''). Morgan Songi offers a lyrical account, noting that in the ``crystal mornings after an ice storm'' the beauty of the land makes up for the isolation of farm life. A fine example of regional anthologizing.

Pub Date: June 18, 1997

ISBN: 0-395-83738-3

Page Count: 388

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
WOVEN ON THE WIND
edited by Linda Hasselstrom ; Gaydell Collier & Nancy Curtis

- BOOK REVIEW
FEELS LIKE FAR
by Linda Hasselstrom

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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.

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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

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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...

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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.