Now in his sixties, the author remembers his childhood and adolescence through a remarkable experience he has created: conversations about Shakespeare's dramas with groups of older people, many of them in nursing homes or isolated by circumstance. Through the stories of Hamlet, Ophelia, Romeo and Juliet, these men and women find themselves drawn in body and soul, discovering their own lives reflected and reinterpreted in the playwright's vision.
What struck me most about this profoundly human and honest book is the tone Bob Smith brings to experiences that must have marked him deeply. He tells them without self-pity, without bitterness. He has taken what wounded him and used it to help others—something few people manage to do.
by Cristina Tersigni, 2004
Sometimes Mom and Dad would go out, and Carolyn and I would be left with the shrew and the fat man who scared me. One night we were in our suffocating room with the door shut so they wouldn't hear Carolyn cry, and the window shut so the neighbors wouldn't hear. Carolyn looked at me. I was leaning over her crib, making faces at her. Then she stopped crying and looked at me. Really looked. For a long time. I was amazed—and a little frightened. I'd never seen her look at anyone before. She never did that. But now she was watching me, and she wasn't crying. And then something happened that was even more beautiful than anything the funeral home's religious calendar could offer: my sister smiled at me. She stopped crying, and there in that stifling little room, shut off from the world that wasn't supposed to hear, the Florida sunset burning through the crack beside the old shutters, no taxi drivers staring pitifully at my mother, no fat men mocking us, no cruel people—just me and my little sister. I took her hand, and we made a promise. Forever. No matter who left, no matter how much I grew up, the two of us would never be parted.From: "The Boy Who Loved Shakespeare"