Despite an ever-present suspicion that this collection of essays is built on a trite and forced premise, it succeeds in celebrating different views of family, self, and space. The best of these 18 essays, by writers such as Tony Earley, Gish Jen, and James Finn Garner, manage to use the construct of a specific room—hallway, kitchen, front porch—to evoke family history and personal relationships. Richard Bausch, Mona Simpson, and Sallie Tisdale look back to childhood and their grandparents' homes as instrumental in forming bonds with home and family. Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells of the early years of the civil rights movement as seen through the family television set. Colin and Kathryn Harrison each write about bedrooms in their home and touch upon issues of responsibility and familial love. Esmeralda Santiago and Jane Smiley write of their solitude, but come to different conclusions: While Santiago sees the closets of her life as an escape from the burdens of poverty and unhappiness, Smiley's essay on the bathroom, one of the strongest in the collection, is a celebration of the body and the senses. In a lovely essay on a family garden that later becomes the grounds of a hotel, Bailey White paints a multigenerational portrait of family and land, and of the way the passage of time ultimately changes what previous generations strove so hard to construct. The afterword, by Allan Gurganus, is a summing up, in which the objects we surround ourselves with resonate with personal meaning, each with its own tale, each instrumental in creating a personal space to call home. Essays, collected by a husband-and-wife editorial and writing team, that invite the reader into the intimacy of the authors' homes and lives with affection, wit, and honesty.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44206-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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