Tonic for malcontents: goes down easily and leaves a lingering, pleasantly sweet and sour aftertaste.
Engaging memoirs of a search for life with meaning that has taken the author from young wife and mother to hippie peacenik and feminist counselor to writer and environmental activist.
Sojourner (Delicate, 2001), a contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, begins with her Catholic childhood in upstate New York. Unsettled by a brilliant, neurotic mother and weak, frightened father, she found her security in reading stories. The following decades brought early marriage and motherhood, a succession of lovers, life in an “urban, anarchist, agrarian commune,” and deep unrest and unhappiness. With rent, food, and childcare covered by various Great Society programs, she returned to college to study sociology, had her consciousness raised by a women’s-studies class, and within a few years was teaching feminist courses and getting even with all the wrongdoing men in her life. In middle age she discovered the work of Edward Abbey, particularly The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, where she now lives alone (her children are grown and on their own) in a small cabin with electricity but no running water. In graceful, brief essays, Sojourner writes about finding her life’s true work and her spiritual home, about slowing down the pace of a too-fast life, connecting with a place, and making friendships with other people who care for that place. Keeping her memoirs from sliding into a smugness are revelations about the author’s devotion to casinos and slot machines, her addiction to her computer’s Scrabble game and e-mail, her troubles with drinking, and her disappointments with men. A portrait emerges of a strong, mature woman, thoughtful, witty, candid, and, if not exactly serene, then content with and even proud of the life she has made for herself and the work she is doing to preserve the beauty of the land around her.
Tonic for malcontents: goes down easily and leaves a lingering, pleasantly sweet and sour aftertaste.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2968-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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