Customer Reviews

Letters from Dwight

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

The other reviewers are right about this book's readability.

But I would also like to alert readers who love their books in short, encapsulated chapters to this book as well.

Each transcribed letter ties into others, but the characters are painted memorably enough to allow lapses of days between readings.

A great book for vacation or business travel.