Review by Booklist Review
Imagine a wooden table. At first glance, it appears ordinary, but the joinery is perfectly hidden. The finish accentuates the grain. It is sturdy and will last lifetimes. It is the work of a master craftsman. Dubus is a master craftsman. He supported himself as a carpenter before he began earning his living with his pen. The personal essays gathered here are framed around family. After a childhood of evictions and continual displacement, the success of Dubus' third book enabled him to build a house of his own with his own two hands. Dubus eloquently shares the fear, hope, and boundless love of fatherhood as he tirelessly protects his sons and daughter from the violence of his own youth. A similar expansiveness extends to his reflections on his complicated relationship with his dad, the celebrated short-story writer, and his maternal grandfather, from whom he learned the value of a hard day's work. Dubus philosophically and vulnerably interrogates his conflicted love of his dogs, the pull and danger of owning firearms, and the lingering lure of violence. In a conversational style that disguises its structure and solidity, Dubus' sentences glide on a level pitch before seamlessly dovetailing into the poetically poignant. Within Dubus' vast heart lies a pugilist intent on defeating his own demons.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Dubus (Such Kindness) expounds in this sharp collection of personal essays on the writer's life, the vulnerability of loving others, and the passage of time. "The Door" recounts how Dubus's worries about becoming jaded in fatherhood dissipated during a tense race to get his four-week-old son surgical care for a life-threatening birth defect, with the author's profound dread over losing his son even driving him to pray despite not believing in God. "All the way to our June wedding, I vacillated between hope and black terror," Dubus writes in "A Letter to My Two Sons on Love," which describes how Dubus fell in love with his wife and worried that his passion for her would expose him to "pain and loss and an acute loneliness." Aside from a noirish essay on Dubus's brief stint as a bounty hunter in his early 20s, the pieces are largely tender and contemplative, such as when Dubus muses on the relationship between writing and mortality while recalling a quiet 1988 conversation at a literary awards ceremony between his novelist father and Raymond Carver while both were in declining health ("I think of how death is forever stalking the creative writer to get his or her work done, no matter how he or she feels about it"). Dubus's sinewy prose strengthens his probing meditations on the inextricable relationship between love and loss. Readers will be moved. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A new nonfiction collection from the award-winning fiction author. Dubus III, who also wrote a well-received memoir, Townie, gathers 18 deeply personal essays, all but one previously published, on fatherhood, manhood, family, vocation, and, most of all, love and gratitude. The father of three writes tenderly of his sense of wonder after the birth of his daughter--"those moments of unspeakable grace" holding a newborn--and of his overwhelming fear when his four-week-old son underwent emergency surgery to correct a congenital malformation. The author honors his wife, whom he credits with nurturing his life "of peace and stability and deep fulfillment." But that life has been hard won. Growing up in poverty, raised by a single mother after his father abandoned the family, Dubus lived in 25 houses throughout his childhood and was bullied as the new boy in town and at school whenever they moved. Angry and defiant, he transformed himself into a muscular fighter with "a short fuse for bad behavior of any kind." Several essays probe the connection between violence and masculinity--e.g., the irresistible allure of guns and the adrenalin rush of a fight. By the time he was in his 20s, though, the author felt terrified that he was incapable of "truly loving someone, and being loved back." A relationship with one girlfriend was doomed by unbridgeable differences in money and class: Her wealth, he writes, "created a chasm between us we tried to pretend wasn't there." Still, while they were together, she taught him to knit--an act that at first he denigrated as a sign of her privilege, but soon came to value. "It required me to focus," he admits, "and it allowed me to drift, too." Although inevitable repetitions occur in pieces written over several decades, the collection melds into a touching memoir. Intimate, moving essays. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
