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Title: My Twice-Lived Life: A Memoir by Donald Morison Murray ISBN: 0-345-43690-3 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 29 May, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Move over Maury......
Comment: Look out Mitch.....you and Tuesdays with Maury are about to be replaced. Dr. Murray delivers his book even better than he did in the classroom. As a former student of his....this book made me laugh....brought a tear to my ear and a lump to my throat. First he taught me to write. Now he teaches me about life as we all face growing older. Thank you for a great read!!
Rating: 5
Summary: A superb columnist looks at life and at looking at life
Comment: I got to know Donald Murray's writing while living in Massachusetts in the mid-90s. Ever since, I've read his Boston Globe column online, and almost always forward it to people I know, from my teenage son to my father in his 80s. I keep hoping the columns will be collected in a book. In the meantime, there's this wonderful memoir. There is more wisdom in a Donald Murray column than in most of the rest of the paper put together, but it's not WISDOM, delivered from on high and meant to make you feel inadequate. He's had a mixed life - a ghastly childhood, wartime service, professional failure and success, profound grief, enduring friendships, a satisfying marriage - but the book is not just a collection of "and then I" passages. Murray conveys so well how the past is always present, how it can be seen more clearly from the distance that decades provide, and how old age is enriched by that clarity, even as one deals with the inevitable losses and physical decline. His style is conversational-seeming, but without the extraneous matter true conversation always has. The passages about being bullied in boyhood are heartbreaking because there is no anger in his account. He doesn't need to express it; the reader will be furious on his behalf. Murray is a teacher of writing, and as a writer, I find his books on the subject are well worth reading (wish I could have studied with him). Readers will learn a great deal about good writing from "My Twice-Lived Life," as well as a great deal about living.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Courage and Clarity of a Twice-Lived Life
Comment: My Twice-Lived Life has long been in the making. Murray's first idea was to publish a collection of his Boston Globe columns that dealt with aging, the Depression, and World War II. His editor convinced him to look at the subject matter as a memoir, whole and of itself. Good idea.
I've read most of Murray's Boston Globe columns. It is often amazing what he does with these 800 word personal essays. But the memoir gives him more room to explore and develop his subject matter.
We're used to Murray writing about writing. There is a little of that woven throughout the chapters in My Twice-Lived Life. But writing isn't his primary topic here. He writes about the stuff of his life---his childhood, his parents, and World War II, in which he was a paratrooper.
One chapter is titled "The Not-So-Good-Old School Days." I'll use this chapter with my students at Miami University who are studying to be English teachers. In direct opposition to those who deify some past golden time of schooling, Don recounts his own school days and deromantizes that myth. He speaks of teachers today, how they seek further learning in summer programs and professional development, and he writes about how he came to teaching writing.
All those chapters were good reading, but the really courageous chapters are about aging. His wife, Minnie Mae, has had serious medical problems with Parkinson's, diabetes, and breast cancer. Don writes about these times of increasing care-taking clearly, compassionately, and unsentimentally.
In "Fatherhood" he ends the chapter by focusing on the death of his 20 year old daughter of Reyes' Syndrome in the late 1970s. Many of us know bits of this story, because those bits have worked themselves into Don's textbooks and columns, but here we get the most complete rendering and sense-making of that story, including one poem he wrote of Lee's passing.
In the last two chapters Don writes about the extended dying of a neighbor, what he learned as nurses and one doctor tended to her and touched her and helped her to let go. I wished I'd had this book to read two years ago during the time my mother slipped away gradually and inexorably.
A friend of mine in Utah used to say of such writing, "That's it. Write about the tough stuff."
Don Murray does that in My Twice-Lived Life. Reading it made me want to live life well, fully attuned to my senses, aware of the compassionate stories around me, learning how I might approach the coming years with courage and caring and humor.
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Title: Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons ISBN: 0553802666 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 02 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Lively Shadow: Living With the Death of a Child by Donald M. Murray ISBN: 0345449843 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Craft of Revision by Donald M. Murray ISBN: 0155069551 Publisher: Heinle Pub. Date: 13 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Write to Learn by Donald Morison Murray ISBN: 0155065122 Publisher: Heinle Pub. Date: 27 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $46.95 |
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Title: Silent Fire: Bringing the Spirituality of Silence to Everyday Life by James A. Connor ISBN: 0812991028 Publisher: Crown Publishing Group Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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