Abe Aamidor
Autor de At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry
Obras de Abe Aamidor
Monastery of Writers 2 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Aamidor, Abraham
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1946-11-17
- Género
- Male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- País (para mapa)
- USA
- Educación
- University of Chicago (BA|Philosophy)
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (MA|Journalism) - Ocupaciones
- Newspaper Reporter and Features Writer
- Biografía breve
- Abe Aamidor is a former long-term feature writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, The (Champaign-Urbana) News-Gazette and The Indianapolis Star. He retired from The Indianapolis Star in 2008. He served as the President of the Indianapolis Newspaper Guild throughout most of the 2000s. He is the author, co-author or editor of seven books, including “At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry” (ECW Press, 2010), and “Media Smackdown: Deconstructing the News and the Future of Journalism” (Peter Lang USA, 2013), which takes an even-handed look at the current crisis in journalism. Since 2012, Aamidor has had more than a dozen short stories published in literary magazines. He resides in the Indianapolis, IN area.
Miembros
Reseñas
How do you measure a life? Is it simply the sum of events, relationships, decisions? Will it finish too late or too soon, like a book badly written? And who will value the life? In the first chapter of Abe Aamidor’s Letting Go, a bereaved father quotes a friend of Bertrand Russell saying, “Your life matters because you did live it.” But his son Bertrand has died in Afghanistan. Will the father’s life still matter?
Reading like a gorgeously written memoir, Letting Go retells the son’s life together with father’s and grandfather’s, through snapshots of people from different worlds, drawn together in America’s melting pot, sent to fight for great causes, and coming home again. Except the father sold encyclopedias and the son didn’t come home. Convincing first-person narration brings to life, and vividly contrasts, teenaged days of cycling and the present-day voice of an old man viewing his “fitness goal.” The “black blooming smell of soil after heavy rain,” is contrasted with city streets where “buildings have… personalities,” the regrets of the past with a desire to matter in the present, and the certainties of official voices with the nuanced nature of relationships. Birds are evicted from their trees, tribes from their land, and a man from the life he thought he’d built for himself.
Small actions have large consequences, in life and in this novel, like concrete filling the space between wooden blocks to keep an old building standing, or memories tucked in the cracks of a sacred wall. Meanwhile a man, not yet so old, seeks a way forward that’s not so tied after all to the past. Only then can he truly look back and value those memories for what they are, proof that “life is for the living.”
Disclosure: I was given a preview edition by the publisher and I really enjoyed the story.… (más)
Reading like a gorgeously written memoir, Letting Go retells the son’s life together with father’s and grandfather’s, through snapshots of people from different worlds, drawn together in America’s melting pot, sent to fight for great causes, and coming home again. Except the father sold encyclopedias and the son didn’t come home. Convincing first-person narration brings to life, and vividly contrasts, teenaged days of cycling and the present-day voice of an old man viewing his “fitness goal.” The “black blooming smell of soil after heavy rain,” is contrasted with city streets where “buildings have… personalities,” the regrets of the past with a desire to matter in the present, and the certainties of official voices with the nuanced nature of relationships. Birds are evicted from their trees, tribes from their land, and a man from the life he thought he’d built for himself.
Small actions have large consequences, in life and in this novel, like concrete filling the space between wooden blocks to keep an old building standing, or memories tucked in the cracks of a sacred wall. Meanwhile a man, not yet so old, seeks a way forward that’s not so tied after all to the past. Only then can he truly look back and value those memories for what they are, proof that “life is for the living.”
Disclosure: I was given a preview edition by the publisher and I really enjoyed the story.… (más)
I found this book by accident. I was looking for another book and found this one on the publisher's website. I contacted the author asking for a review copy, and he graciously provided me with one.
I'm torn. He wrote a completely compelling novel about a guy who just didn't deserve the attention. Actually, none of the characters seemed like anyone I would want to know.. There wasn't one point where I liked ANYBODY in the book. This feels like a completely masculine novel, though; so I may have been reacting to that feeling of wish fulfillment in his leaving his family to indulge his fantasy of becoming a writer (I wasn't impressed with any of the excerpts of his work we got.). Of course he indulged in some casual sex too. I was curious whether he would have been okay with it had his wife done the same in his absence. I wished his home had not been there waiting for him, even though it was in a different city that he had originally left.
I loved his musings on writing and what it meant to him and others, The story of the Monastery of Writers kept me reading too. I was expecting a lot more action, but that is not a negative for me. There was enough meat in the mystery for me to maintain interest throughout the book. The ending of the book was flat, but I suspect that was intentional.
… (más)
I'm torn. He wrote a completely compelling novel about a guy who just didn't deserve the attention. Actually, none of the characters seemed like anyone I would want to know.. There wasn't one point where I liked ANYBODY in the book. This feels like a completely masculine novel, though; so I may have been reacting to that feeling of wish fulfillment in his leaving his family to indulge his fantasy of becoming a writer (I wasn't impressed with any of the excerpts of his work we got.). Of course he indulged in some casual sex too. I was curious whether he would have been okay with it had his wife done the same in his absence. I wished his home had not been there waiting for him, even though it was in a different city that he had originally left.
I loved his musings on writing and what it meant to him and others, The story of the Monastery of Writers kept me reading too. I was expecting a lot more action, but that is not a negative for me. There was enough meat in the mystery for me to maintain interest throughout the book. The ending of the book was flat, but I suspect that was intentional.
… (más)
See Amazon dot com - many positive reviews. Also reviewed positively in all leading motorcycle magazines.
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 8
- Miembros
- 27
- Popularidad
- #483,027
- Valoración
- 3.8
- Reseñas
- 4
- ISBNs
- 7
I'm torn. He wrote a completely compelling novel about a guy who just didn't deserve the attention. Actually, none of the characters seemed like anyone I would want to know.. There wasn't one point where I liked ANYBODY in the book. This feels like a completely masculine novel, though; so I may have been reacting to that feeling of wish fulfillment in his leaving his family to indulge his fantasy of becoming a writer (I wasn't impressed with any of the excerpts of his work we got.). Of course he indulged in some casual sex too. I was curious whether he would have been okay with it had his wife done the same in his absence. I wished his home had not been there waiting for him, even though it was in a different city that he had originally left.
I loved his musings on writing and what it meant to him and others, The story of the Monastery of Writers kept me reading too. I was expecting a lot more action, but that is not a negative for me. There was enough meat in the mystery for me to maintain interest throughout the book. The ending of the book was flat, but I suspect that was intentional.
… (más)