A heartfelt love song to a place and its people as well as an honest and rewarding rendering of the author’s interior...
A rural expatriate examines the pain caused by leaving the place she loved, the struggle involved in aligning her sexuality with faith and hometown values, and the devastation wrought by rural depopulation.
Hoffert grew up in a tiny North Dakota farm town. From a young age the author understood she was gay. After attending college, she established a successful professional career and satisfying personal life in Minneapolis. Though the lure of home persisted, when she returned, she remained mute regarding her sexual preference. “There is something that silences the stories of lives,” she writes, “…and something that pushes those who cannot stand the silence away from the beauty that was once their childhood home.” Hoffert returned home for a month during harvest season, intent on exploring the stark, beautiful landscape, working on the family farm and discovering the root of the ingrained silence surrounding her sexuality. Woven into the author’s personal exploration are startling and sad facts on the state of rural life in America, illustrating the “painfully irreversible population decline” that is leading to the extinction of small towns across the country. Hoffert ponders the meaning of this loss and whether she is a member of “the first generation to realize that the world of rural America—both the good and bad of it—will never again be as it once was.” The author’s mostly quiet narrative includes a wealth of haunting images and ideas that will linger long after the last sentence.
A heartfelt love song to a place and its people as well as an honest and rewarding rendering of the author’s interior landscape.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4473-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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