Reid vividly depicts both her husband’s sickness and her own feelings of loss and guilt in this memoir.
A recently widowed college professor looks back on her marriage and the death of her husband.
In 2015, Reid (Tillie Olsen, 2011, etc.) experienced “a loss that nearly destroyed my mind and life” when her husband, John Fischer, died after a four-month battle with a mysterious respiratory illness. She turned to writing about their marriage as a way of coping with her loss, and the result is worthy of comparison with classic memoirs of grief. The author, a professor of English, met Fischer on a visit to Louisiana State University in 1974, and they were married the following year. They were a devoted couple who shared a similar sense of humor and a passion for literature; Fischer was a leading scholar on the satirist Jonathan Swift. They would read the poems of Theocritus to their daughter and enjoy research assignments in England. The idyll ended after Fischer experienced spasms in his chest while shopping in January 2015. “Sat there until my lungs quit quivering,” he told her. Fischer’s death just four months later left the author “ravaged by guilt” and wrestling with a litany of things that she thinks she could have done to save him. But she found solace through writing the memoir and going on an African safari with her daughter, where their adventures “brought us close to nature, to each other, and to John’s spirit.” Throughout this book, Reid charts her spouse’s rapid physical decline with agonizing clarity—“John’s skin looked like a larger man’s hand-me-down bodysuit”—and she also makes convincing assertions that he was a victim of neglect by his doctors: “alarm bells should go off when doctors just keep offering the same hypotheses despite declining health,” she says. The author also points out that the best grief memoirs “provide both a powerful feel of the person lost and sharp insight into the writer herself.” Her own book passes that test with flying colors.
Reid vividly depicts both her husband’s sickness and her own feelings of loss and guilt in this memoir.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wild River Legacy
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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