In these posthumously published notebooks of Camus, written well before he was thirty, one can find the seeds for almost all the later works, from The Stranger and Caligula on to The Fall. The themes, however, present themselves more peripherally than profoundly, and what we have here, often in those clear, classic constructions which so marked the Nobel Prize winner's style, is really genius in its green days: something explorative, something essayistically exuberant, at times very moving. Camus same early to the truth as he saw it: modern man's confrontation between ideals and deologues, the hero as exile in a blank slate of existence, a universe without God, a day-to-day monotony of megalopolis, of alienation both from humanity and from nature. For Camus the experience of the absurd was everywhere— "not only is there no solution, but there aren't even any problems"; yet as the notebooks and the novels show he sought both. Over and over in these pages, filled with a young man's debt to persons (readings n Kierkegaard, Aurelius, Tolstoy), to place (travels in Algeria, France, Italy) and to casual contacts (scraps of overheard conversation; studies in character), it is the "complete awareness" of the facts, of death and of freedom, of love and despair, which he preaches. Sensual fulfillment and stoical objectivity are the weapons, the acceptance of pleasure and of pain the programme. A resolution to live within the limits of the possible, a tragic joy in a "univers absurd", these cahiers are relevant and revelatory, the journey of an era and a man.
Pub Date: July 15, 1963
ISBN: 1569249938
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1963
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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