![]() ![]() In a telling tale called “A Voice for Equality and Civility at Dartmouth,” Smoller recollects the serious events that led his fraternity of Theta Chi to become Alpha Theta. The college that Smoller met in the early 1950s had no doubt changed to become what it is today, and even in his brief stories, these changes can be seen. While explicit stories about Dartmouth only constitute about three to four of the stories in the book, the college has a great place in Smoller’s life. Smoller’s personal and jovial tone continues through his accounts of Dartmouth and the Air Force in the 1950s.įor a Dartmouth audience, the most interesting element of the book is Smoller’s connection with the college. The book is propelled forward through stories of messing around in his father’s dental office as a child and of ordering a tuna fish sandwich and milk on his first date. The book’s strongest sections are towards the beginning with Smoller’s tales from the 1930s Brooklyn Streets providing a solid foundation for the rest of the book. Rarely will one find a book that equally discusses the wonder of a child attending a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field in 1940 and the impact of the coronavirus on an old man finding a suitable barber in 2020. The joy of following the Dodgers in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s is not a universal tale, but Smoller relates the joy he felt as a young boy with this ill-fated team with such intrigue and charisma that any sports fan or a passionate fan of anything can understand and find value in his experience. Most of his brief stories favor on the didactic side which can lend themselves to favor a universal, all-encompassing message, and his best stories are the ones that start as particular to him and then branch out from there. Smoller is at his best when he discusses events and experiences that are particularly personal to him. Chronicling his childhood on the streets of Brooklyn through his time at Dartmouth and in the Air Force and then all the way into operating his own dental practice, Smoller delivers a concise yet intriguing peek into a life that runs the gambit through the mid and late-twentieth century. The book consists of twenty or so four to five-page stories from his life, allowing the hopping from story to story to weave together an enjoyable reading experience. Rather than opting for an overriding narrative that links his life together, Smoller elects for a short burst of individual windows into his life. Smoller is able to walk the fine line of an impactful memoir for a targeted Dartmouth audience. In his new book Mark My Words: Reflections, Reminiscences and Recollections from a Life Well Lived, Dartmouth Class of 1953 Mark H. What differentiates a memoir from the rest of the pack is an author’s sincerity in their writing and the connection to the reader, and the latter of the two makes a universal memoir hard to come upon however, while it might not achieve a universal impact, a memoir that can relate to a specific group of people can achieve a focused yet successful amount of impact. Most contemporary memoirs often rely on the name of the author and this romanticization of the past to achieve brief notoriety and then fade into obscurity, ending up in used book stores $1 bin. This nostalgia, often by romanticizing the past, can cause a book to be an enjoyable read but have little lasting merit. ![]() Memoirs, especially those written late in life, are ripe for falling into a tunnel vision of nostalgia. ![]()
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