Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.
A memoir from magazine writer Rose that tells us more about who she knows than who she is—and not much in either case.
The author comes out brandishing a knife and looking for trouble in her scant introduction: “People can come into my room if I invite them, but if they don’t like it they can get out fast, because it’s my room.” But as Rose begins her story, her prose goes lugubrious, and “get out fast” seems less like a challenge than a defense mechanism. The memoir maunders along in semi-torpor, detached and depressed as it describes a series of futility wars with hazy, sleep-in protectiveness, perhaps developed in response to her father’s cruel snideness. Rose does some modeling, takes acting classes, cobbles together some friends, all of whom in their 20s display a world-weariness that suggests the next move can only be into a bottle of Seconal. She drops names—always friends of friends or family, never hers—but Robert Hofstadter, John Reed, Tennessee Williams as portrayed here have no more resonance than photographs torn from magazines. When Rose scores a job at the New Yorker, she manages to perk up and wilt at the same time: for once she’s alert to her surroundings, but they give her the swoons, especially when filled with her gods: “Harold Brodkey, George Trow, and three whom I’ve come to think of as Europe, Personality Plus, and Mr. Normalcy . . . all of them were deeply engaged and seriously attracted”—wives notwithstanding. (Rose can’t be bothered with spouses either: “It can be a form of actual day-to-day torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison married people offer you. . . .”) What follows is a compendious, enervating catalogue of snappy responses and witticisms between her and the men, in and out of office and restaurants and bed.
Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4124-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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