A delightful celebration of a consuming passion.
The New Yorker’s acclaimed “Comma Queen” explores her captivation with all things Greek.
Norris (Between You & Me, 2015), whose first book recounted her career in the New Yorker’s copy department, offers an exuberant memoir of her transformation from a sheltered schoolgirl in Ohio to a passionate Hellenophile. Thwarted by her father from learning Latin—“Was Dad against education for women? Yes”—the author revived her fascination for dead languages after seeing Time Bandits, part of which was set in ancient Greece. Since the New Yorker generously paid tuition for classes that had some bearing on an employee’s work—as a copy editor, knowing Greek could be helpful—Norris enrolled in modern Greek and ancient Greek courses at NYU, Barnard, and Columbia. The Greek alphabet enthralled her. It was adapted radically, she discovered, from the Phoenician alphabet into “a tool for the preservation of memory, for recording history and making art.” Delving into etymology, Norris makes a case for the enduring vitality of Greek by revealing its widespread roots in English. Ancient Greek, she asserts, “is far from dead.” As she painstakingly immersed herself in learning the language, the author took her first trip to Greece, where she “shot around the Aegean like a pinball,” making brief stops in Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Samos, Chios, and Lesbos. As a solo traveler, she found herself the object of much male attention. “Dining alone in restaurants,” she reports, “I was a tourist attraction unto myself.” That trip incited her desire to return—she recounts subsequent journeys in lyrical detail—as well as to tackle Greek classics: “I wished there were some way I could be Greek or at least pass as Greek, just by saturating myself in Greekness.” She devoured books by Lawrence Durrell and, especially, Patrick Leigh Fermor, two renowned philhellenes, and she steeped herself in heroes, myths, and, gleefully, goddesses. Mythology, she writes, gave her myriad models for women’s roles beyond “virgin, bride, and mother,” choices that seemed so constricting to her as she grew up.
A delightful celebration of a consuming passion.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00127-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
