Reviews for The New Penguin Book of the Guardian Crosswords 1

The average rating for The New Penguin Book of the Guardian Crosswords 1 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-23 00:00:00 Lisa Ng What an endearingly personal experience for me to relive one of my favorite professor's voice, and to go back home myself to the familiar hills of Lewiston, Idaho and the brutality of the Montana high plains. Mixed in with personal accounts, this memoir recounts a favorite aunt's descent into Alzheimer's while juxtaposing her aunt's and her own histories. The writing is sparse and powerful; Blew'w personal insights are painful and poignant. A must read!!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-27 00:00:00 Tareva Borges This starts out in Port Angeles, Washington, where we stand with the narrator to look out onto the Strait of Juan de Fuca with an aunt who knows the shipping habits of various trawlers. Soon enough, the narrative turns to the college town of Lewiston, Idaho, and to recollections of tough ranch life in mid-century, central Montana. For me, the narrative went from what I thought was very clear and lucid, to a bit confusing, then on to clearer and more understandable. I think this was partly to illustrate the process of getting to know the aunt, and to show the process of recollection -- both by a person whose memory is relatively intact but has the failures that memory always has, and by the other person in the narrative, the aunt, who is developing dementia. As is the case with most stories that involve dementia, this can be difficult. But I liked how accurately Blew captures the experience of living with a person who has dementia. Aside from and intertwined with the action of getting to know the aunt and her dementia, there's the narrator's recollections of growing up in central Montana -- and her sympathetic speculations about her aunt's experiences growing up there too. The latter are based partly on terse but character-filled diary entries. It's a book of the West -- but also a book about what happened to a family that emigrated from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to try to cultivate a ranch in Montana. It's fascinating in part because that Pennsylvania family tried so hard to replicate the order and verdant landscape of Bucks County, in the vast spaces of central Montana.