A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.
Literary criticism/memoir regarding an overlooked American novel.
In the latest volume in the publisher’s Bookmarked series, Almond (Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, 2018, etc.) delivers an energetic discussion of Stoner, the 1965 novel by John Williams (1922-1994), who won a National Book Award for Augustus (1972). The Bookmarked series encourages authors to personally engage with the works they are championing, and Almond delves into personal failures and accomplishments as well as relationships with family, friends, and students, all through the prism of Stoner. Though some readers may find this approach disruptive, it results in a sensitive and perceptive reading of a novel Almond first read when he was a struggling 28-year-old writer. He has since read it innumerable times, each time learning more about the novel and himself. Stoner, which has been reissued a few times, is a quiet, reflective tale that recounts the life of a rural farm boy who becomes an English professor, husband, and father. Almond offers this “peculiar pint-sized ode” to a novel that has become for him a manual for “living.” A “literary novel” that is also “subversive,” Stoner “casts a piercing light upon the worship of power and wealth that has corroded our national spirit.” Almond loves how it “captures with unbearable fidelity the moments of internal tumult that mark every human life.” At times, he gets “furious” with William Stoner the “perfect martyr,” the “hardcore masochist.” He discusses the novel’s “unrelieved narration,” or “plain style,” as Williams described it, and its portrayal of a wrecked marriage, the nasty world of academic in-fighting, and the challenges of child-rearing. Almond argues that Stoner is both an anti-war novel and, with its detailed portrait of the “collision of poverty and privilege,” a “radical social novel.”
A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63246-087-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
