Scattershot pieces held together by context and emotionalism.
Children’s-book author Gelman (Doodler Doodling, 2004, etc.) follows up Tales of a Female Nomad (2001) with a collaborative collection of essays—and a smattering of recipes—celebrating travel, diversity and human connection.
In the introduction, the author writes that she has lived without a fixed address and with minimal possessions, traveling the globe since 1987. While Female Nomad depicted the first 15 years of that unfettered lifestyle, the sequel is constructed of essays submitted to her website in response to an open call for stories about “connecting” and “risk-taking.” The result is a mixed bag of (mostly Eurocentric) tales from around the world, which largely affirm a sense of human decency, generosity and community beyond the borders of language or political affiliation. Among other experiences, the stories chronicle bonding with Vietnamese women over primitive laundering techniques; sharing a boisterous, vodka-fueled breakfast of cow-feet soup in Armenia; considering a Ugandan’s offer to cry with an American volunteer overwhelmed by the unfairness of life in the third world. Some of the essays are humorous, such as the recollection of dodging a potentially dangerous situation with a Peruvian enticed by a novelty “one-million-dollar bill.” Some are melancholy, such as one woman’s playful “marriage” to an Iraqi man shortly before the U.S. invasion threw the country into chaos. While most of the essays take place in exotic locales, some are domestic, with strangers lending helping hands or women opening themselves up to unexpected, unconsummated intimacies. The brevity of the pieces—most lasting only a couple pages—works for the simpler or funny stories, but the more serious ones feel stunted. The strength of the writing varies considerably, with the contributors a mix of amateurs and professionals, but all feature an appealing sincerity.
Scattershot pieces held together by context and emotionalism.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-58801-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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