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MIDSTREAM

Name: MIDSTREAM
Author: Reynolds Price
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8349-6

AN UNFINISHED MEMOIR

by Reynolds Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2012

The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.

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The late acclaimed novelist, short-story writer, playwright and memoirist begins with a return to Oxford University in 1961 and breaks off shortly after the death of his mother in 1965.

When he died in January 2011, Price (Ardent Spirits, 2009, etc.) had completed about two-thirds of this memoir (he had already chosen the title); his younger brother assembled the current volume and offers a grim afterword about Reynolds’ final rough months of debilitating pain in his wheelchair and bed. Price’s former student at Duke, novelist Anne Tyler, contributes a lovely foreword. The rough text is, of course, not polished. The early sections in particular (written from memory and from a diary he kept) are often superficial accounts of meals and socializing. But occasionally something piercing pokes through the surface. Price had hoped to rekindle an earlier relationship with a former lover, but the man let him know immediately that he was now with a woman. A bit later the author provides a star-struck but amusing account of a Roman meal and visit to the set of Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Things pick up with Price’s return to the United States, where he lived for a while in the guesthouse of composer Samuel Barber, who was proposing a collaboration with Price on the libretto of a new opera for Leontyne Price. Price suggested using the Pocahontas story; Barber demurred. Price has some thoughts about his peers (e.g., John Updike and Philip Roth) and the JFK assassination, but emerging most strongly is his love of teaching, which he practiced for more than 50 years at Duke.

The lines that gleam are poignant reminders of a searing light now lost.

Pub Date: May 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4391-8349-6

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
ARDENT SPIRITS
by Reynolds Price

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOOD PRIEST’S SON
by Reynolds Price

- BOOK REVIEW
A SERIOUS WAY OF WONDERING
by Reynolds Price

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.