Kenneth S. Brecher

The concept for this book, a memoir built around a postcard collection (or perhaps personal postcards to help illustrate or illuminate a memoir) is intriguing; however, the execution of that idea in Kenneth Brecher's "Too Sad to Sing" fails on several levels. This is truly a wisp of a memoir, at a mere 118 pages, with more than half the space taken by reproductions of the postcards.

The author provides only a superficial glance at his life. He opens speaking of the deaths of two dear friends, and the profound impact those losses had on him emotionally, but he never conveys why those friendships were so intimate and special. And then he moves on to other aspects and events in his life. While he mentions other interesting facets of his life, including his studies at Oxford and several anthropological excursions around the world, he never provides any real depth, and so this fails as a memoir. You can sense that the author has, for some reason, held back on the details of his life, and the complete honesty that would be required for a deep personal memoir of substance. Instead it is merely a collection of short disjointed vignettes of his life. And it is a haphazard, scattershot approach at that. The book is filled out with some reflections on people he has known (primarily those with whom he has had a postcard correspondence relationship), some musings on his passion for collecting postcards, and some of his favorites in the collection. Unfortunately it all adds up to very little.… (més)