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9781550025941

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I think most readers will care, and will be moved, and perhaps even feel a touch of something like wisdom.

<p> Dobbs's swift prose seats the reader in a canoe, as the memoirist manages, with the economy of retrospection to steer around unanticipated rocks in the midst of history's profuse foam and spray. One gift this memoirist bestows on an audience is the succinct celebration of both bad and good luck, in the medium of consistently good prose. Misfortune itself becomes an object of aesthetic pleasure, something fortuitously or laboriously overcome. Like all worthy autobiographies, Running the Rapids feels impersonal to the degree that the predicaments and pleasures it describes assume an exemplary, even an allegorical dimension. I was repeatedly confronted by the strangeness of human life as I absorbed Dobbs's experiences.<p>Although Dobbs's memoir considerably augments my knowledge of him, the firmest image I retain of the author is of this quill-wielding, stool-perched, voluminous-wigged, intent, and apparently indefatigable figure. <p> Books in Canada , February 2006

Running the Rapids reveals a complex man, adaptable, self-deprecating, wryly humourous, multi-talented ( cultivated would be his own word) and with an intellectual integrity that partly explains his being not much more affluent now than he was fifty years ago. --Dervla Murphy The Irish Book Review

Memoirs don't recount lives - they would be very boring if they did - but pinpoint highlights, key moments, telling episodes. They chronicle what the author remembers or chooses to remember as the pivotal, critical, defining or amusing moments of his journey. That is why autobiographies are so revealing. Human lives are remarkably similar; it is what a person chooses to recall about his or her life that is different. Some chiefly remember hurts and failures; others recall mainly pleasures and triumphs. Few lives consist solely or even predominantly of lights or shadows - but many memoirs do.<p>What Mr. Dobbs remembers is running the rapids. It makes his book a symphony of whirls and eddies, swift water and still water, depths and shallows. His structure is equally fluid: the memoir remembers things in a quasi- chronological order, but some episodes link up thematically more than temporally, and a few appear in sequential proximity simply because they seem to have occurred to Mr. Dobbs at the same time. It is said of such books that they might have benefited from more rigorous editing. In this case, no... It is one of the book's charms that it is something of an unmade bed: vague, haphazard, at times repetitious, at other times skimpy on basic information. In this, it resembles the author's persona - perhaps not in real life, but as it emerges from the story. Untidiness becomes Mr. Dobbs. Messiness fits in trace amounts; a gently meandering stream-of-consciousness strikes the right note. It is like being in the company of a quick-witted and acutely observant person who has just started wandering a bit; a fine raconteur, whose senior moments are barely beginning to register on thedodderscope. <p>George Jonas, The Literary Review of Canada, March 2006

Author Information

Kildare Dobbs was born in 1923. Running in Paradise, an early memoir, won the Governor General's Award in 1962, and in 2002 he was made writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. He also received the National Magazine Award for journalism. His The Eleventh Hour: Poems for the New Millennium appeared in 1997.

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