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Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers Kindle Edition

3.4 3.4 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

"Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers stands above much of the crowd in its commitment to ask, 'What is it to remember?' Mathias B. Freese, tenderly plaiting a web that spreads from Woodstock, Las Vegas, Long Island, and North Carolina, locates friends and family, lovers long since gone, desire and passion sometimes quenched sometimes unrequited, and the harrowing agony that comes from that most soul-crushing word of all, regret. But Tesserae is not a work of sadness and grief. Rather, it is an effort from a trained psychotherapist adept at understanding the feelings that we all have. The quiescence found has a staying effect upon the mind; this memoir lingers in the reader's memory for some time."
-- Steven Berndt, Professor of American Literature, College of Southern Nevada
Mathias B. Freese is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, This Mobius Strip of Ifs, was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 in general non-fiction and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust was the winner of the Beverly Hills Book Awards, Reader's Favorite Book Award, Finalist of the Indie Excellence Book Awards, and finalist at the Paris Book Festival and the Amsterdam Book Festival.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01B52VXM0
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wheatmark (January 26, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 26, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1405 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 236 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.4 3.4 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

About the author

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Mathias B. Freese
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MATHIAS B. FREESE is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist who has authored eight books. After his first novel, 'The i Tetralogy' on the Holocaust, his second work, 'I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust', won the Beverly Hills Book Award, Reader's Favorite Book Award, and was a finalist in the Indie Excellence Book Awards, the Paris Book Festival, and the Amsterdam Book Festival. In 2016 'Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers', his first memoir, received seven awards. The following year his second memoir appeared, 'And Then I Am Gone'.

Customer reviews

3.4 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2016
    What is a tessera? It’s a small piece that together with others make up a mosaic. Author Mathias Freese digs deeply into his life and psyche to examine the mosaic of his own life—who he is and what made him who he is, where does he want to go. Why should we as strangers care? We may not, but...
    I don’t know the author, but I found Tesserae to be an insightful experience of the process of examining one’s life and inner being. This takes a lot of self awareness, something most of us probably don’t have to the extent Freese does. Readers who are introspective and enjoy thinking may appreciate Mr. Freese’s musings. Some of his short chapters repeat bits of his life, so I think much of the book is a series of meandering short stories rather than one long story. He focuses on the meaning of two summers he spent at Woodstock during the late 60s. This is not about the famed Woodstock Music Festival, which was held about 60 miles from Woodstock, NY, but about the little town itself, which was an artist colony. “Woodstock isn’t so much a place as a feeling of discovering freedom from growing up in the repressed 50s.”
    Freese is definitely a damaged soul, a self-described guilt-wracked curmudgeon nearing the end of his unaccomplished life. I, however, found him to be a most interesting character, a good writer, and highly intelligent with insightful perspectives. He is very hard on himself, which made me sad, and I hope he finds peace as well as the love he craves—he is not an unloveable man, and his writing is intimate and confessional, drawing the reader in as a friend. I found many bits of wisdom to chew on and remember. “Maybe I write because it is in the word that we find our worth,” he says. He has many worthwhile words.
  • Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2017
    Rambling and disjointed musings from an aging hippie Mensan who must have swallowed a thesaurus. I'm sorry I spent money on this.
  • Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2016
    Mathias B. Freese is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, "This Mobius Strip of Ifs," was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 in general nonfiction and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His "I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust" was one of three finalists chosen in the 2012 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest out of 424 submissions. The same quality of humanity shines through on every page of this ’memoir’ – a sacred vessel of memoires and how they nurture us.

    The title of this luminous book – TESSERAE – is defined as a name given to pieces used in a mosaic. The flavor of the entire book is suggested in Matt’s opening Introduction: ‘I sorely miss the sixties. I miss them because they are still within me; missing them is akin to loss. It was the time that I spent two indelible summers in Woodstock, at ages twenty-eight and twenty-nine. So powerful was the impact that deep into the seventies, with a wife and child, I would take off on an occasional Saturday and go up alone on the New York Thruway to Woodstock to spend the day. It was like visiting a cemetery, all the lost and lonely people. Woodstock was, and forever will be, a Proustian remembrance of things past for me, an addictive nostalgia and sentimentality, indeed, a sciatica of the spirit. When I practiced as a psychotherapist I had a client who was profoundly mourning her beloved husband. Each day she would go to his graveside and leave flowers and undoubtedly speak to his marker with all kinds of feelings. I think of her in that cemeteries are for the living and just depositories for the dead. Woodstock became a cemetery for me in the early to mid-seventies, a place I needed to come to in order to be reminded of the feelings, relationships, and human interactions I had experienced. It was a devotional feeling, like lighting a memorial candle for a dearly departed loved one. What is it to remember? To recall, retrieve, reflect, to go back for a moment, to feel a period of time long since gone. What is it to have memory in this organic memory box that we own? What purpose does the past serve in the present other than societal clichés about it? Why do we have associative feelings when we dredge up an early memory? What is memory’s purpose?’

    If you are able to resist plunging into this comforter then perhaps you need this book even more than most. Matt is wise, thoughtful, inspiring and a very fine writer. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, February 16
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2016
    Memoirs can be a secretive, very private writing of one’s life, or rather how one recalls one’s life.
    Mathias B. Freese presents his memoirs to the public in Tesserae. He shares with his reader the joy, the agony, the pain and the regret of years gone by. As a psychotherapist, he understands human interaction better than most and uses this knowledge to tell his own story. A story of the “Flower Power” 1960’s, Woodstock, New York, music, culture, therapy, affairs, dissolved marriages and a forgotten daughter, death of wife, Freese has laid bare all of his faults and foibles to tell a fascinating tale.
    We live through 1968 and 1969, with his weird friend Hal, his mistress Marlene, and several other characters that played a part in his “growing up.” Anyone that grew up during this period of cultural revolution, will have their own memories rekindled. Memories of the days of love, free sex, drugs and rock and roll, all cleverly laid out in front of you by the author. Shirley A. Roe, reviewer
    In the seventies, he has a spiritual awakening and his search for self. Readers follow his life, feel his pain, his joy and his self analysis throughout the book. Impossible to describe, the reader must read this book for oneself to fully appreciate the genius of the author.
  • Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2016
    The collection is part-memoir part-adventure-novel. By using his experiences on those two summers in particular, and interspersing the narrative with the past of the past and the future of the past, Freese has created a marvellous book. The thing that will stay with me, is how very intimate the book is. It is a deep-dive into the author’s innermost fears, dreams, insecurities. He talks of his first love, his wife, a failed marriage, and his intense but brief relationship with his daughter. He talks of these events as if talking to a friend, and it took a lot of stepping back on my part to not feel upset and embroiled in it all.

    from [...]

Top reviews from other countries

  • Amazon Customer
    4.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended
    Reviewed in Canada on March 14, 2016
    Memoirs can be a secretive, very private writing of one’s life, or rather how one recalls one’s life.
    Mathias B. Freese presents his memoirs to the public in Tesserae. He shares with his reader the joy, the agony, the pain and the regret of years gone by. As a psychotherapist, he understands human interaction better than most and uses this knowledge to tell his own story. A story of the “Flower Power” 1960’s, Woodstock, New York, music, culture, therapy, affairs, dissolved marriages and a forgotten daughter, death of wife, Freese has laid bare all of his faults and foibles to tell a fascinating tale.
    We live through 1968 and 1969, with his weird friend Hal, his mistress Marlene, and several other characters that played a part in his “growing up.” Anyone that grew up during this period of cultural revolution, will have their own memories rekindled. Memories of the days of love, free sex, drugs and rock and roll, all cleverly laid out in front of you by the author.
    In the seventies, he has a spiritual awakening and his search for self. Readers follow his life, feel his pain, his joy and his self analysis throughout the book. Impossible to describe, the reader must read this book for oneself to fully appreciate the genius of the author.
    Mathias B. Freese is a writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. His recent collection of essays, This Mobius Strip of Ifs was the winner of the National Indie Excellence Book Award of 2012 and a 2012 Global Ebook Award finalist. His "I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust" was one of three finalists chosen in the 2012 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Tesserae has received an Honorable Mention at the 2016 Las Vegas Book Festival.
    A gifted writer, always unique in presentation and subject, Mathias B. Freese gives his readers another wonderful read. Highly recommended. Reviewer: Shirley A. Roe,

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