Tag: memoir
Those Were The Days On Nantucket Sound

Those Were The Days On Nantucket Sound

The new memoir about the Kennedys, “The Nine of Us,” is a lyrical looking glass into a time that feels forever lost — when the richest class felt a deep obligation to give back to the people, to serve in the military and politics. The “to whom much is given, much us expected” motto was a mantra in the Kennedy summer compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Excellence in all things was encouraged, from riding to sailing to writing thank you notes. On these pages, a clear-eyed sister tells the tale of their younger, vibrant selves.

The scene is set from the beginning, a sharp contrast from the gaudy gold and chrome Trump Tower:

“The white house looked over the sea … an overgrown Cape Cod cottage with white wooden shingles and black shutters. … The white house was full of activity, chatter and laughter. Full of books on shelves and sports gear in closets. And especially full of children.”

Oh, it brings back the old days, of New England zest and camaraderie, a ready wit and willingness to get skin in the game. Touch football, anyone?

Then there were debates over dinner — you had to be scrubbed and dressed for dinner — on the raging issues of the day. “What would you do if you were president,” their father drilled them. Jack, the lover of history and books, would be 99 years old today. The striking Joe, the oldest, was the one groomed for the job, but he volunteered for a dangerous mission in World War II and got blown from the sky. He was the first to shatter the Kennedy family idyll. Jack, in a way, got elected to run by his family first. The ironic, impossibly cool Jack almost had no choice, as the second oldest son.

The author Jean Kennedy Smith is the only living one of the nine Kennedys born between the teens, ’20s and ’30s. At 88, the former ambassador to Ireland remained as the key holder of certain stories and insights about their youth, all nine of them. She and the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy were the youngest, and her character portraits of her sisters, brothers and parents come from that vantage point.

Who knew that the intense Bobby had a pink and black spotted pig named Porky that went with him everywhere? He also tended to rabbits, all manner of animals and made friends easily. “You have a lot on the ball,” his father Joe wrote to his third-oldest son.

A charmed moment is a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a stamp collector, to young Bobby, a fellow philatelist: “Perhaps sometime when you are in Washington you will come in and let me show you my collection.” Indeed, the boy did.

Smith suggests that her brother Bobby was the secret favorite of her parents, Rose and Joe Kennedy, Irish-Catholic Boston stock. Rose’s father, Honey “Fitz” Fitzgerald was the beloved mayor of Boston — political royalty.

Singing “Sweet Adeline” and reciting the classic “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” poem was the stuff of their childhood.

Joe’s dying young was followed by their sister “Kick,” a lively presence who married an Englishman destined to be a duke. She, too, died young in a plane crash. Eunice was “sporty” and such a force she might have been president if she wasn’t a girl. She founded the Special Olympics.

There are London days in Jean’s teens, as father Joe served as the ambassador to the Court of St. James (and gave Roosevelt bad advice about Germany and staying out of the war).

Nothing but the best might as well be written between the lines. Yet the Kennedys have a gift of being inclusive in their exuberant privilege, not running rampant with it simply for vainglory. You feel that you, too, are sailing on Nantucket Sound that summer day. Teddy, with the sweetest social nature, became a great sailor till nearly the end of his days, at age 77. He was the only brother to “comb gray hair,” as the elegiac Irish line goes. The artist Jamie Wyeth painted his friend Teddy sailing into the light.

Jack’s light touch comes through a letter to Jeannie: “I am most pleased to hear from you and am fully conscious of the honor.”

Call me nostalgic, because that’s exactly what I am this Thanksgiving.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

IMAGE: AFP Photo

Weekend Reader: ‘On The Move: A Life’

Weekend Reader: ‘On The Move: A Life’

In a February op-ed published in The New York Times, Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and cultural luminary, revealed to the world that he was dying of terminal cancer.

Sacks discussed his new resolve to live life free of inessentials, and his gratefulness for being able to participate in what he called “the special intercourse of writers and readers.” It’s a relationship that Sacks has built and maintained over the decades through his myriad essays and books, such asAwakeningsandThe Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which meld his extensive knowledge of the biology of the brain with a generous, inquiring spirit, and shine a light on what he dubbed “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

In his latest book, On the Move: A Life, the “human subject” is Sacks himself. Picking up where his previous memoir, Uncle Tungsten, left off, On the Moveis a chronicle of unmoored youth, capturing young Sacks’ detours, setbacks, and flashes of early brilliant discovery.

You can read an excerpt below. The book is available for purchase here.

Muscle Beach

When I finally made it to New York in June of 1961, I borrowed money from a cousin and bought a new bike, a BMW R60 — the trustiest of all the BMW models. I wanted no more to do with used bikes, like the R69 which some idiot or criminal had fitted with the wrong pistons, the pistons that had seized up in Alabama.

I spent a few days in New York, and then the open road beckoned me. I covered thousands of miles in my slow, erratic return to California. The roads were wonderfully empty, and going across South Dakota and Wyoming, I would scarcely see another soul for hours. The silence of the bike, the effortlessness of riding, lent a magical, dreamlike quality to my motion.

There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.

I arrived back in San Francisco at the end of June, just in time to exchange my bike leathers for the white coat of an intern in Mount Zion Hospital.

During my long road trip, with snatched meals here and there, I had lost weight, but I had also worked out when possible at gyms, so I was in trim shape, under two hundred pounds, when I showed off my new bike and my new body in New York in June. But when I returned to San Francisco, I decided to “bulk up” (as weight lifters say) and have a go at a weight- lifting record, one which I thought might be just within my reach. Putting on weight was particularly easy to do at Mount Zion, because its coffee shop offered double cheeseburgers and huge milk shakes, and these were free to residents and interns. Rationing myself to five double cheeseburgers and half a dozen milkshakes per evening and training hard, I bulked up swiftly, moving from the mid-heavy category (up to 198 pounds) to the heavy (up to 240 pounds) to the superheavy (no limit). I told my parents about this — as I told them almost everything — and they were a bit disturbed, which surprised me, because my father was no lightweight and weighed around 250 himself.

I had done some weight lifting as a medical student in London in the 1950s. I belonged to a Jewish sports club, the Maccabi, and we would have power-lifting contests with other sports clubs, the three competition lifts being the curl, the bench press, and the squat, or deep knee bend.

Very different from these were the three Olympic lifts — the press, the snatch, and the clean and jerk — and here we had world-class lifters in our little gym. One of them, Ben Helfgott, had captained the British weight-lifting team in the 1956 Olympic Games. He became a good friend (and even now, in his eighties, he is still extraordinarily strong and agile).  I tried the Olympic lifts, but I was too clumsy. My snatches, in particular, were dangerous to those around me, and I was told in no uncertain terms to get off the Olympic lifting platform and go back to power lifting.

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The Central YMCA in San Francisco had particularly good weight-lifting facilities. The first time I went there, my eye was caught by a bench-press bar loaded with nearly 400 pounds. No one at the Maccabi could bench-press anything like this, and when I looked around, I saw no one in the Y who looked up to such a weight. No one, at least, until a short but hugely broad and thick-chested man, a white-haired gorilla, hobbled into the gym — he was slightly bowlegged — lay down on the bench, and, by way of warmup, did a dozen easy reps with the bench-press bar. He added weights for subsequent sets, going to nearly 500 pounds. I had a Polaroid camera with me and took a picture as he rested between sets. I got talking to him later; he was very genial. He told me that his name was Karl Norberg, that he was Swedish, that he had worked all his life as a longshoreman, and that he was now seventy years old. His phenomenal strength had come to him naturally; his only exercise had been hefting boxes and barrels at the docks, often one on each shoulder, boxes and barrels which no “normal” person could even lift off the ground.

I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater poundages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at — the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym — “Sacks and his fives.” I didn’t realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent, in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.

Excerpted from On The Move by Oliver Sacks. Copyright © 2015 by Oliver Sacks. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

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Stories That Honor The Fallen: Memorial Day Reads

Stories That Honor The Fallen: Memorial Day Reads

By Leah Price, Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia) (TNS)

Monday is Memorial Day. Many will participate in the annual custom of decorating the graves of war dead with flowers, a tradition that began in 1868. Others will attend special commemoration events, or spend time with family remembering loved ones who were lost.

Another way to recognize their sacrifice might be to read about the wars and conflicts that took their lives. I asked several folks for book recommendations and was amazed at the diversity and depth of their selections.

Wilford Kale, Williamsburg, Virginia, author of a number of nonfiction books of local interest, was in the U.S. Army from July 1968 to June 1970. He served with the 1st Signal Brigade in Vietnam from May 1969 to June 1970 as a 1st Lieutenant and received a Bronze Star medal. He recommends the following reading:

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson wrote Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg in 2003, published by Crown. Still in print and also available through a variety of used-book sources, it is a compact look at the Battle of Gettysburg when thousands of Blue and Gray soldiers died in the three-day conflict. The Union casualties were 23,049 (3,155 dead, 14,528 wounded and 5,365 missing); the Confederate casualties totaled 28,063 (3,903 dead, 18,735 injured and 5,425 missing). An illustrated edition of the book was published May sixth by Zenith Press and is packed with significant photographs and illustrations along with McPherson’s original text.

Beyond the Call by Lee Trimble with Jeremy Dronfield was published three months ago by Berkley Caliber of New York. It is a wonderful story of a World War II pilot’s secret spying and recovery mission behind the Eastern Front to rescue Allied prisoners of war from right under the noses of the Russians. Captain Robert Trimble’s son researched and co-authored the inspiring narrative.

Lastly, well-known award-winning historian and author Stanley Weintraub takes the reader to the Korean War and recounts the slaughter of and epic survival of members of the U. S. Marine Corps and the Army as they battled the Chinese Communists and North Koreans during the disastrous winter of 1950. The book, A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival During the Korean War, was published last fall and is available in hardcover and newly released paperback.

Shana Gray, Daily Press deputy night editor, grew up in Fayetteville, N.C., home to the 82nd Airborne Division and Special Operations Command, and is known in the newsroom as a World War II buff. She took a look through her extensive collection and suggested these titles:

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo by Ted Lawson. The book tells the inside story of the training and aftereffects of the famous raid over Japan, a mission in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, by one of the Doolittle Raiders himself. Written shortly after the raid, the book is the definitive account of the mission.

The Bedford Boys by Alex Kershaw. On D-Day, 19 servicemen from one small town in Virginia were killed in the first wave of troops going onto Omaha Beach in Normandy. Full of anecdotes with those who survived, family, friends, letters, and more, the book examines the men who died and the town of Bedford, which lost more men in one day than any other U.S. city.

Day of Infamy by Walter Lord. Filled with the history and facts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the author keeps the narrative personal, from the point of view of people who were just going about their Sunday when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Including photos and maps, the book provides a comprehensive look at the attacks and the losses.

Daily Press reporter Hugh Lessig, who covered the Hampton Roads military beat for a number of years for the Daily Press, offered the following recommendations:

Look Away, from William C. Davis. A perceptive history of the Confederacy from the political side. It shows how the Confederacy did some things that a strong central government would do — such as nationalize the salt industry.

Wired For War by P.W. Singer. It examines the growth of drones in warfare and raises important ethical questions that still haven’t been answered.

Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty. A profile of a man from Spain who became one of the most famous double agents in World War II. From his post in England, he fed the Nazis all kinds of information about troop movements and ship strength — all of it wrong. He was instrumental in getting the Germans to believe that D-Day would not happen at Normandy.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks Describes His Fascinating Life In ‘On The Move’

Neurologist Oliver Sacks Describes His Fascinating Life In ‘On The Move’

By Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (TNS)

On The Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks; Knopf (416 pages, $27.95)
___

Hold on a minute: The young stud straddling the BMW motorcycle on the cover of On the Move is Oliver Sacks, the genial neurologist of Awakenings?

As this memoir makes clear, the Whitmanesque Sacks truly contains multitudes: The compassionate scientist who writes beautifully and travels to Mexico to look at ferns has also been a motorbike buff, competitive weightlifter, and, in the past, a drug abuser.

In February, the 81-year-old Sacks revealed in a New York Times op-ed that he has terminal cancer.

In reacting to the mild-mannered way in which philosopher David Hume described his own terminal condition, Sacks wrote, “I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.”

Indeed, On the Move is a memoir of a man who lived the advice of Ms. Frizzle: Sacks has taken chances, made mistakes, and gotten messy.

On the Move picks up where Uncle Tungsten, Sacks’ childhood memoir, ended. He grew up in London in a brilliant, loving Jewish family, with his father a doctor and his mother a surgeon. Unfortunately, mother’s love and support did not extend to her teenage son’s attraction to other males. “You are an abomination,” he reports her once saying. “I wish you had never been born.”

“I have needed to remind myself, repeatedly, that my mother was born in the 1890s and had an Orthodox upbringing and that in England in the 1950s homosexual behavior was treated not only as a perversion but as a criminal offense,” Sacks writes.

He understands now that his mother spoke those words when she felt overwhelmed and probably regretted them.

But he also admits that “her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous express of sexuality.”

In college at Oxford, Sacks won 50 pounds for an essay on anatomy, then spent 44 pounds on “the most coveted and desirable book in the world” — the 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary, presaging his future as the man who would revive the art of the literary medical case study.

Feeling that London already contained too many Dr. Sackses, he sought his medical destiny in the United States. While pursing advanced training, he rode his motorcycle around California, at least once making the unexpected acquaintance of Hell’s Angels. He pushed himself relentlessly in weightlifting, at one point setting a California state record.

But while he became strong, Sacks writes, that physical strength did nothing for what he calls his “timid, diffident, insecure, submissive” character. He also became addicted to amphetamines. “A rash drug taker in the 1960s, I was prepared to try almost anything,” he confesses.

Freaking out more than once, he was helped back to earth and sanity by a calm friend, a black physician improbably named Carol Burnett. Sacks may have struggled with sexual and romantic relationships, as he relates in his book, but he has clearly been both gifted and fortunate in his friendships.

Giving up the laboratory, where he often fumbled, Sacks turned to clinical work with patients, and found his calling.

His work with postencephalitics at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx led to his book Awakenings (1973) and the subsequent movie. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), a collection of case studies, became a best-seller and made him famous — a mixed blessing for a man who loves solitude.

Sacksologists will find many nuggets to chew on in this memoir, including details on his clinical work, memories of Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, thoughts about autism and deaf culture, and hints about books he has not yet published.

I see the roots of his compassion in family relationships, including his Auntie Birdie (who played a role in his world similar to Sook in young Truman Capote’s life) and his brother Michael, who was given insulin shock treatment after a psychotic break as a teenager, and never developed the ability to live a normal independent life.

Once, after a fall from a Norwegian mountain path led to a horrific leg injury, Sacks considered that he might be dying. “A line from an Auden poem, ‘Let your last thinks all be thanks,’ kept going through my mind.” That sense of gratitude permeates On the Move.

(c)2015 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.