A quiet memoir with emotional power that is subtle, artful, and piercing.
The author of the honored novel The Archivist (1998) returns with a sometimes-wrenching memoir-in-essays about love and loss.
Cooley (English/Adelphi Univ.; Thirty-Three Swoons, 2005, etc.), a translator and an editor for the literary journal A Public Space, writes here about a caesura of 14 months in a small Italian village with her husband, a period that gave her time to travel a bit, to ruminate about loss (a writer friend, the decline of her parents, an ill neighbor who lives in a castle in the town, and more). The author also writes about local events (the wreckage of a cruise ship lies not far away) and animals (cats, birds, a fox that kills some goslings), and she quotes many lines from notable poets, including T.S. Eliot (principally), Whitman, Dickinson, Galway Kinnell, among others. Cooley moves stealthily around in time, using the shifts as both ally and enemy. She uses time to tell her story, shaping it to fit her needs, but she also fears time and what it has done and continues to do. (Her father suffers from Alzheimer’s; her mother has gone slowly blind; she thinks about her own aging.) Cooley also shifts tenses frequently and even changes person: in one affecting passage, she employs the “you” of the second person. Throughout, the author navigates leisurely through her year abroad, recounting how she and her husband drove to the mountains to hike, visited the local cemetery, interacted kindly with feral cats, ate local food, and tried to work on a new novel. But visitors from her memory keep intruding and demanding her attention. Most prominent among them are her parents, now in an assisted living facility, and the author is devastated that she is losing them both.
A quiet memoir with emotional power that is subtle, artful, and piercing.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-46-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
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