A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance....
The first publication of a long-lost work by revered Appalachian writer Dykeman (1920-2006).
Written in the early 1940s, just after her graduation from Northwestern University, Dykeman’s observations on nature display her charming ability to remember small joys: sitting on a rock near the creek watching life floating by over the creek bed, a luna moth in flight, the sounds and feel of the country. Her intimacy with water is evident as her descriptions transport readers into the moment: rain, puddles, mists, walking in damp earth, and even the smell of newness after a flood. Her stories of the first 14 years of her life evoke the innocence of childhood before we lose the sense of incredibility and uniqueness of things. Predating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by almost 20 years, Dykeman’s work bemoans the negative changes to nature: the housing booms and the losses of woodlands, habitats, and, mostly, solitude, something her father introduced to her as a singular freedom. A person who lives with nature is the only truly real person, compelled only by natural laws—laws so primal and universal that they also rule the lives of plants and animals. In addition to the author’s abiding affinity for nature, she has a beautiful, lyrical writing style. Throughout her life, she ached to satisfy her imagination not with facts but with the feel of things. Dykeman grew up near Asheville, North Carolina, and her father, 60 when she was born, was her light, her guide, and her muse. He and her mother, more than 35 years younger, took their only child for walks in their woods, to the creeks, hollows, and meadows, reveling in everything they saw—and it shows in this enjoyable series of reflections.
A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance. Anyone who has lived in the countryside, or wished they had, will enjoy Dykeman’s celebration of nature.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2914-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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