An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work.
Tantalizing glimpses into the life of a recently-discovered writer.
More than a decade after Berlin (1936-2004) died, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories was published, and she began to find readers (Manual was a finalist for the 2015 Kirkus Prize). In a biographical note that first appeared in Manual, Stephen Emerson writes that Berlin lived a "rather flamboyant existence." This book is certainly evidence of that. The first part is an unfinished memoir chronologically organized by the places she lived, with photographs from her son. It’s the story of a child, then woman, who lived an itinerant existence. Born in Alaska to a father who had to travel for work, the family moved to Idaho and then Kentucky, Montana, Idaho, Texas, and elsewhere. Berlin describes each home in exquisite, imagistic language, providing insights into how her unique writing style evolved. In Helena, a man’s cabin is “an unpainted hut, really, with windows that looked like eyes and a door that was a goofy crooked smile.” In a list of more than 30 of her residences, she crisply describes each—e.g., “House Edward Abbey had lived in. Only one burner worked. Filthy.” And later: “No catastrophe. So far.” A lengthy stay in Santiago, Chile, where she learned Spanish, went well, but her life was filled with hardship, alcoholism, drunken and addicted husbands, and money problems. There’s very little here about her reading and writing, but clearly, the life lived is the inspiration for her stories. The second part contains letters written from 1944 to 1965 revealing a conflicted, anguished young writer. Most are to friend and mentor Ed Dorn, the Black Mountain School poet. In college, she wrote Dorn about sudden ambitions, and in the same letter, “I’m just so fouled up.” In 1960: “I am so miserable. I have never been so afraid and unhappy….I believe…I am a writer…even believe that I am a good one.”
An excellent start to understanding a writer and her work.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28759-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
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