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About Alice |
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About Alice |
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基本信息·出版社：Random House
·页码：96 页
·出版日期：2006年12月
·ISBN：1400066158
·条形码：9781400066155
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语
内容简介 In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”
Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”
But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with
About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
作者简介 Calvin Trillin has been a staff writer at
The New Yorker since 1963. He lives in New York.
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly Trillin (
A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), a staff writer with the
New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was a writer and educator who survived a 1976 battle with lung cancer. In 1981, she founded a TV production company, Learning Designs, producing PBS's
Behind the Scenes to teach children creative thinking; her book
Dear Bruno (1996) was intended to reassure children who had cancer. A weakened heart due to radiation treatments led to her death on September 11, 2001, at age 63. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life in this slim volume, opening with the suggestion that he had previously mischaracterized Alice when he wrote her into "stories that were essentially sitcoms." Looking back on their first encounter, he then focuses on her humor, her beauty, her "child's sense of wonderment," her relationship with her daughters and her concern for others. Trillin's 12-page "Alice, Off the Page" was published earlier this year in the
New Yorker, and his expansion of his original essay into this touching tribute is certain to stir emotions.
(Jan. 2) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile ABOUT ALICE is Calvin Trillin's homage to his late wife, Alice. Read by the author with tenderness and affection, the memoir is a celebration of the life the Trillins shared. Thankfully, Trillin reads the book because it would be difficult to conceive of anyone else's voice containing a more genuine mix of love and longing. Trillin clearly worshiped his wife, and his devotion echoes in every syllable of every word. As a reader and critic of Trillin's works, Alice offered him affirmation. In ABOUT ALICE, Trillin now seems to want spiritual rather than earthly approval for his work. Although Alice may be gone, Trillin's short but thoroughly satisfying tribute provides us with a glimpse of this charming and intelligent woman. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. From Booklist Anyone who has devotedly followed Trillin's decades of writing in the
New Yorker about matters contemporary knows intimately Trillin's affection for his wife, Alice, who succumbed to lung cancer in 2001. His readers had grown accustomed to Alice's illuminating presence in Trillin's poetry and prose, and they grieved, if more remotely, almost equally deeply, the loss of the writer's companion, lover, and inspiration. This succinct account of Alice's upbringing, their meeting, their romance, their family, and her career beyond that of Trillin's helpmeet, offers glimpses into a multifaceted character. The optimism Alice radiated reflected that of her father, who kept his family together despite business reverses, and her life bore witness to a profound and encompassing embrace of the meaning of love, which Trillin documents in vivid anecdotes. Consonant with the woman's strength and courage, her unaffected outreach to fellow victims of death-dealing disease sets a worthy standard for tender yet honest compassion.
Mark KnoblauchCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
