Letters from Dwight [Paperback]

Gary Kern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

A "down and out" memoir describing slum life in Southern California. The author, an ex-professor of Russia, rents rooms on Dwight Avenue (Riverside) to an incredible series of oddballs, meanwhile trying to keep up with events in the collapsing Soviet Union and to maintain contact with his broken family. His letters, transcribed from cassette recordings sent in the 1980's, describe the most ordinary and yet fantastic experiences: going to a strange Halloween party, living with a religious maniac, reading aloud to friends with a barn owl perched on his shoulder, visiting his hometown (Washington DC) and getting lost on the beltway, discovering the filthiest toilets in the world (Moscow), dealing with crazy Russians, debating with professors at the university, running madly after sex, suffering serious injury in karate class, riding in an ambulance with bullets whistling all around, freaking out from the medications... It's an unusual ride with an author who speaks with urgency, irony and brutal wit.

Product Details

• Paperback: 333 pages
• Publisher: Xenos Books (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879378353
• ISBN-13: 978-1879378353
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,391,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Son of a Washington DC zookeeper, I first studied zoology, then turned to Russian literature and history. My favorite authors and classical composers are Russian, German and Scandinavian. Favorite art is German Expressionism. I live in New Mexico and am married to a beautiful bellydancer.

My works include eight books translated from Russian, about thirty articles--including a large one on torture and intelligence--and a book on atomic espionage co-written with a KGB colonel. Most recent books are A DEATH IN WASHINGTON: WALTER G. KRIVITSKY AND THE STALIN TERROR (Enigma Books, 2004) and THE KRAVCHENKO CASE: ONE MAN'S WAR ON STALIN (Enigma Books, 2007). See my website for photos, translations and opinions:

http://home.earthlink.net/~gwkern/

At present I am collecting materials for a book on torture, and for another on the ultimate extinction of the wild tiger due to the demand for its body parts generated by so-called Traditional Chinese Medicine. The tiger is doomed, and this is a disaster for the world.

I have done over 30 book reviews on Amazon. See my review, for example, of Peter Altenberg, TELEGRAMS OF THE SOUL. Click my name there, and you'll see the other reviews.

I have one LISTMANIA: US Prisoner Abuse: Torture Films on DVD. You have to enter this exact title, because if you enter only "torture films" you'll get all the chain-saw and slasher movies. The torture of terrorist suspects is a crucial issue for the future of the United States, because if it becomes policy it removes all claim to American exceptionalism.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kern's brilliant description: Down and out in Riverside, CA, November 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Letters from Dwight (Paperback)

This is an incredibly interesting series of letters written by an ex-professor of Russian who, through a series of misfortunes, finds himself forced to live in a ghetto in Riverside, CA, along with an incredible parade of oddballs and freaks too unbelievable to have been made up. This book is both serious and hilarious. I couldn't put it down! When I finished I passed it along to my wife and friends, all of whom reported that, they too, could not put it down.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dostoevskian view of the Inland Empire, June 29, 2006

By 

A Reader (San Francisco, California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Letters from Dwight (Paperback)

Gary Kern is the Dostoevsky of the Inland Empire! If you've lived in Riverside, California, or even if you haven't, these stories will draw you in with the urgency of an accounting of life as we really experience it, with its true smells and textures, without any sugar coating. Kern has a way with words, and keeps the pages turning as we follow his various encounters with the tormented, the damned, and the merely strange. Yet his narrative never descends into a freakshow, as freakish as many of the characters and situations may be. (This is a trap Joan Didion falls into in her otherwise entertaining essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a 1964 murder trial in San Bernardino).
Highly recommended. It made my morning and evening public transportation commute pass by like a dream.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is fascinating!, October 4, 1998

By 

Dan Angelo (Colton, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Letters from Dwight (Paperback)

It is a true story of a Princeton scholar who moved to California and soon lost all he had - his professorship, his family, his career - as told through transcriptions of letters sent to friends on audio cassette. Kern's style is masterful, verging on magical: I cannot otherwise explain why this book is so captivating. There is no plot, since it is a series of letters, and being a dean in an institution of higher education, I can certainly identify with the vagaries of the Academy and it's disregard for the individual, as visited on Mr. Kern. Yet none of this explains how or why this book gets under the skin. My only conclusion is that through an intelligent yet accessible style, Kern presents himself as a modern day Everyman and the story of his life is a morality play of the nineties. In this story he encounters a series of strange individuals (too bizarre to have been made up!), searches for work, searches for love, and ultimately, finds the woman who takes him away from the human swamp known as Dwight street, from which his letters are sent. One can only hope that, if visited with similar circumstances, one would respond as rationally, and ultimately publish a book about it! I am giving copies of this book to intelligent and insightful friends who I know will appreciate it.

- Dan Angelo