As with many collections, the quality varies, but the best of these heartfelt essays bear powerful witness to suffering,...
Essays in praise of writing and faith.
Journalist, fiction writer, and teacher Pritchard (Creative Writing/Arizona State Univ.; Palmerino, 2014, etc.) collects 15 pieces that testify to her belief that art is “a form of active prayer” and writing literature, a “sacred vocation.” The author addresses several essays to aspiring writers. In “Spirit and Vision,” she exhorts writers to think of their lives as “a form of perpetual perishing, that as you lose yourselves in devotion and discipline to your work, you will attain the Beloved and begin to perceive the divine reality in all.” Another essay recounts her search for a regional voice as indelible as those of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, writers “inextricably linked to place.” In the brief but potent essay “Elephant in the Dark,” Pritchard underscores the importance of a story’s point of view, asking, “which character owns the story most deeply?” A few pieces are slight memoirs: the author recalls her experience researching at the British Library; teaching British, Irish, and American writing students at Warwick University; and reflecting on why she came to admire Georgia O’Keeffe. Longer pieces are more substantive. “Finding Ashton,” a moving piece with a tragic ending, recounts her friendship with a female soldier that began when Pritchard was embedded with troops in Afghanistan. “ ‘Still, God Helps You’: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave” reveals the harrowing story of 33-year-old William Mawwin, whom the author met when he was a student in Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives. When she discovered that he had to drop out of community college due to financial difficulties, she heard a “voice” that commanded her to pay for his tuition and books. In the course of many interviews, he related his experiences of unspeakable degradation and cruelty as a child slave.
As with many collections, the quality varies, but the best of these heartfelt essays bear powerful witness to suffering, compassion, and transcendence.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-934137-96-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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