An infectious memoir from someone engagingly candid about her temporary homeland's limitations—and her own.
The story of a British academic who, intending to fulfill her childhood dream of northern living, took a university job in Reykjavik.
Moss (Creative Writing/Warwick Univ.) arrived in 2009, 16 years after the summer visit that was her only actual previous contact with Iceland. Finding herself living in the country she had fantasized about for so long—and with two small children in tow—wasn’t traumatic, exactly, but it was obvious to both the author and everyone around her that she was a stranger in her new country. She determined to bike in a land where SUVs are the preferred mode of transportation and the weather is hostile more often than not. Unable to speak Icelandic and unwilling to speak English, she was so clearly on the outside looking in that it would have been foolish to pretend otherwise. Still, her memoir never veers into the maudlin, a refreshing perspective from someone who was so obviously out of her element. Though Moss and her family didn’t make it to many tourist attractions (extreme cold not being ideal for toddlers), this actually makes the book better. By shielding her family from the winter and long drives in terrifying traffic, the author managed to lead what seems in her recounting to be an extremely Icelandic life. She achieved an understanding of the land and people, revealed here in subtle “aha” moments that readers will enjoy. She realized, for example, that Iceland's financial crisis, at its height during the year of her residency, was especially traumatic for a society that considered itself truly egalitarian. Much of what Moss learned, or learned to accept, is summed up when she writes, “The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.”
An infectious memoir from someone engagingly candid about her temporary homeland's limitations—and her own.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-122-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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