A memorable study in contrasts, recounted with understanding and verve.
Based on memory, parental revelations, published material and uncovered correspondence, New Yorker and New York Times contributor Stille (The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, 2006, etc.) considers his forebears.
The author’s mother, Elizabeth, was a bright, pretty girl, a bit flighty in her youth. Her father was a self-made, well-regarded, WASP-y law professor. Stille’s grandfather was a clever, philandering dentist, and his name, Kamenetzki in the Russian shtetl, became Cammenschi in prewar Italy. The family immigrated to New York when Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish racial laws. After service in Italy during the war, their son, Mikhail (Misha to the family), found his calling as the American correspondent for the leading Italian newspaper. His pen name, “Stille,” became the family name. At a party (for Truman Capote), Elizabeth encountered Misha (aka Ugo Stille), prompting her to leave her feckless husband for her new, sophisticated suitor. The author examines the relationship between these charming and brainy people from disparate upbringings, noting how she was neat and organized, while he was irascible and sloppy. There were sexual tensions in their world of literati and hipsters, and Elizabeth struggled mightily with her decision to stay in the marriage, which often descended into separations. The author presents a history of considerable scope, exploring in the process the relationship between life and literature: “Life is infinitely complex and messy, and literature works the opposite way: through the distilling and fixing of things into a limited number of words and pages that then (one hopes) takes on a life and meaning of its own.” Though Stille’s rare stabs at humor may be a bit wan, he depicts the histrionic partners in a truly mixed marriage with sharp insight and affection.
A memorable study in contrasts, recounted with understanding and verve.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-15742-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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