In New York, Mexico, Berkeley, and around the Mediterranean, in spurts between 1952 and 1962, Howler Ginsberg filled eighteen notebooks with poems, recorded and fabricated dreams, notes on visits and conversations, political ravings, and metaphysical ponders: "This lone/scribble in the margin of my days." From that bulk of scrawl, editor Ball has chosen the passages of "greatest general or literary interest" and furnishes footnotes to elucidate the references to books, movies, and the crowd of writers with whom Ginsberg shared peyote, philosophy, and feverish talk—William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Carl Solomon, Peter Orlovsky. Much of the prose is as telegraphic and leap-frogging as the poetry, though it sometimes settles down to business ("My first novel will be a local work—Paterson Revisited. . ." "Nathaniel West wrote true surrealist novels—must read the sources, Cocteau") or reduces itself to elastic one-liners: "Timelessness seen as infinite extensiveness of one moment's room." But the expected Ginsberg themes dominate—anti-establishment rage, drug-enflamed struggles between "phantasy" and the "real sensation"—and the churning mixture of real names and places with Ginsbergian imaginings should satisfy both underground scholars and those harboring a bizarre nostalgia for a singular milieu. "I think I'll be unamerican a few minutes/See how it feels like—eek!
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1977
ISBN: 0802133479
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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