A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Gail Caldwell, . . Random, $24.95 (228pp) ISBN 978-1-4000-6248-5
This is a coming-of-age memoir by a prize-winning book critic of the
But as this is a memoir, not a polemic, no part of it is without its own complications. Caldwell's memories are laced through with an overwhelming nostalgia for the Texas where she herself could not make a life. Her adolescent dreams, she tells us, almost always "involved breaking free of those lonesome, empty plains, whatever it took." Yet her prose is riddled with longing for the father with whom she identifies, and who is the very personification of a Texas—full of grit, courage and the refusal to knuckle under—that she insists on finding worthy of admiration. The nostalgia is both enriching and problematic, as it almost inevitably leads this writer into the sea of rhetoric. And while the rhetoric is not deep enough to sink a ship, it is sufficient to leave the author floating too often in "poetic" abstraction when she should be grounded in prose that is both penetrating and precise.
Nonetheless, Caldwell comes through as a wise and winning woman—her descriptive passages on college life in Austin in the '60s and '70s are wonderfully smart, moving and sympathetic—and she emerges from
Reviewed on: 12/05/2005
Genre: Nonfiction
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-4498-9889-2
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