A brief memoir for lovers of writing and reading in which we learn more about dogwoods than about the author.
A poet’s memoir finds its form in a tree.
As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill (The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, 2011, etc.) has compiled a long publishing history as a poet, essayist, war correspondent, editor, and translator. Here, he attempts something different: “It seemed to me that an extended meditation on the intersection between personal and natural history might hold interest if for no other reason than to offer a different way of thinking about the tradition of writing memoirs.” This may be enough of a reason for those of a literary bent, but the result is a memoir that is less about who the author is and what he has done than how he writes and what he has read. In other words, it’s a particularly bookish book, which has its rewards. Merrill begins with a boyhood fort under a dogwood tree and then digresses into a conjuring of the area during the Revolutionary War, in particular the heroism of “Captain Henry Wick’s youngest daughter, Tempe (short for Temperance).” Some two centuries later, he writes, “I can still smell the smoke and mold in her house and the log hospital nearby, where so many soldiers died.” The author writes of balancing his academic pursuits with work in a nursery and other jobs that brought him close to nature and, eventually, to the point where, in all his travels, “transplanting had become the story of my life.” Merrill ends with a quote from his friend and inspiration, W.S. Merwin: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” He also mentions marriage and a family, but there is less on them than on dogwoods in their various manifestations—as metaphor, in diplomacy, and as keys to both poetry and spirituality.
A brief memoir for lovers of writing and reading in which we learn more about dogwoods than about the author.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59534-809-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Trinity Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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