A low-key, pleasing account of finding home—the place, “perhaps, where I will end my days”—by an accomplished storyteller.
Novelist Proulx (Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, 2008, etc.), the laureate of the Wyoming outback and the Canadian shore, returns to familiar haunts—this time in real life.
French Canada figures as a point of origin in the author’s lightly written memoir, in which a great-grandfather speaks: “I know I have feefteen child leeveing, how many more in Minnesota, Canada, y’odder place, O do not know.” So do Rhode Island and a few other points on Proulx’s personal map. Most of the book, however, concerns the section of land along the North Platte River that came into her possession a few years ago, and where she has since made her home. The “cow-speckled” land, by her description, is rugged, marked by gullies, dust and a dramatic cliff that marks a geological fault—good cause for a meditation on the Rio Grand Rift, a massive fault system that “has made not only the Rio Grande River gorge near Taos but some of the West’s most beautiful valleys.” Proulx also finds resemblances to contemplate between her eponymous ranch and Uluru, or Ayers Rock, the great Australian monolith that seems weirdly bathed in interior light. Her depictions of the Wyoming landscape in all its moods are in keeping with the best of the Western nature-writing tradition, full of celebration and evocation. But oddly, the narrative contains fewer reveries about the land than one might expect, and a lot of what might be considered helpful hints for would-be bookish homesteaders, ranging from the proper design of an office (with lots of surfaces for laying out maps and piling up paper) and bookcases (to hold thousands of books) to how to relax in a Japanese soak tub (“The long soak was wonderful,” Proulx writes, “but an hour later, I discovered a terrible flood in the library”).
A low-key, pleasing account of finding home—the place, “perhaps, where I will end my days”—by an accomplished storyteller.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8880-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
