Kumin and her husband experienced an idyllic life on their 200-acre horse farm in New Hampshire, “living a wide-open...
A posthumous publication of five essays by former Poet Laureate Kumin (And Short the Seasons: Poems, 2014, etc.), who died in 2014.
The last essay, written when she was 88 years old, shows a still-sharp, sensitive woman, happy in her life on a New Hampshire farm with her 92-year-old husband, Victor. They met at the end of World War II when she was a Radcliffe student and he, an engineer stationed at Los Alamos. Her essays, as much as her poetry, reflect her outlook on life and the importance of her animals: her horses and dogs, many now buried near the pond that she and her husband dug so many years ago. Even those not attuned to the music of poetry will be moved by her work, which is very much rooted in the rural landscape. Her eventual move toward strong political statements took her from light verse to the poetry of witness. She grew up in the 1930s and fought to become a poet against the usual attitudes against women becoming, well, much of anything. A grant in 1961 from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study gave her the validation she needed to spur her career on. She became a staff member at Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England, and was named poet laureate in 1981. By that point, Kumin had ensured her place among the great American poets of the 20th century. The real joy of this book is the author’s love of all things country and New England.
Kumin and her husband experienced an idyllic life on their 200-acre horse farm in New Hampshire, “living a wide-open lifestyle.” Happily, she shared that life with the rest of us through her writing.Pub Date: July 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24633-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
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
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