The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she...
A young essayist with a flair for poetic imagery offers a rites-of-passage collection that could almost be a memoir with a few more dots connected.
Baxter writes often about weather and emotional weather and frequently sees correspondence between the two. The combination is most powerfully dramatic in “From the Blue,” about a thunderstorm that electrocutes a young man working in the fields and the profound effect this has on both the essayist and the closely knit community: “We live on this little island of land, surrounded by waterways, the rivers, the lakes, and oceans, the streams below us, the aquifers. Bodies break and return to water and carbon. We all run out, eventually to the sea or rise up into the clouds.” In the title essay that serves as the collection’s centerpiece, the author writes with more edge and depth than she brings to the rest of the pieces, which mainly seem to concern a series of complicated romances, further complicated by what’s inside her head, culminating in the marriage that is the least detailed of these relationships (and the least romantic), quickly followed without explanation by divorce. It doesn’t bode well when she describes her relationship with the man who will become her husband with a tone that barely rises above resignation: “We are past the point of convincing ourselves that this is love. Which is a relief to some extent, like letting someone know your real name. It was nice having something noble to fight for but at least this is honest, as honest as we need it to be.” However, he may not have been past that point, or at least he likely wasn’t when he proposed marriage. Readers will be happy to learn in the acknowledgments, though not the essays, that love has finally gone right for Baxter, who now has a fiance she thanks “for inspiring me daily to live boldly.”
The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she continues to work on it.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68003-172-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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