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MY FATHER’S BONUS MARCH

Name: MY FATHER’S BONUS MARCH
Author: Adam Langer
ISBN: 978-0-385-52372-1

by Adam Langer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2009

Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.

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A son searches for insight into his father, who died in 2005, by probing his fascination with the Depression-era Bonus March.

Novelist Langer (Ellington Boulevard, 2008, etc.) is the son of the late Seymour Langer, doctor and dutiful but distant father. The author vividly remembers his father talking about writing, but never completing, a book about the 1932 Bonus March, in which World War I veterans were rousted from Washington, D.C., after demanding early payment of a promised service bonus. Langer dubs the March his father’s “Rosebud,” the mysterious clue hinting at the man’s soul, and he spends most of the book trying to discover why this long-ago event meant so much to his father—did he feel unworthy because he hadn’t served in the military?—meditating on a man he never fully knew and on the meaning of unfulfilled dreams. The author hops around in time, alternating scenes of his childhood, early manhood and the present, as he researches family and friends’ memories of his father while dishing out relevant history about the March. Elements of the story will touch readers with similar experiences, like caring for an aging parent or seeking closure for unresolved parent-child questions. Unfortunately, large sections of the narrative, such as the dead-end leads that Langer pursues, become tedious and self-indulgent. The author concludes that his father was a contented man who may not have wanted to write a book. Indeed, his brother tells him that the uncompleted book probably matters more to him than it did to their dad.

Poignant, but would have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-52372-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Adam Langer

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by Adam Langer

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by Adam Langer

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.