Rooney’s admirers won’t mind, though those unfamiliar with the commentator will wonder at the oddness of it all.
“If I reach into my pocket to pay for something and pull out a handful of change that turns out to be mostly pennies, I get discouraged about life.”
Thus Andy Rooney, who has made more than a few pennies over the years as a TV commentator, most famously for his sometimes curmudgeonly, sometimes cloyingly cute monologues on 60 Minutes. The nonagenarian is a veritable byword for folksiness. As this gathering of his work over the years shows, his homespun pronouncements can veer from cracker barrel to downright eccentric, sometimes in the same sentence (“It sounds funny in the house without the television set on”; “Doctors ought to think of some name for their outer office other than ‘waiting room’ ”). Rooney has solid credentials as an old-fashioned liberal of an almost extinct type, one who dislikes hubbub and loudmouths but dislikes injustice even more. He is also keenly aware of the contradictions of life in society, noting, “If I were black, I would be a militant, angry black man, railing against the injustices that have been done me. Being white, I think blacks should forget it and go to work.” Most of the views gathered here are less provocative, however. Readers who think of Rooney as a lightweight may be surprised to find that he has meaty credentials as a journalist and writer, going back to his days with Stars and Stripes in World War II, when he wrote a book about the work of bomber crews that Edmund Wilson was moved to single out for praise in the New Yorker. Still, the present collection is mostly made up of offhand remarks about how much things have changed between then and now (“You don’t have to go to Mexico to get a taco”)—all vintage Rooney, of course, but with few surprises.
Rooney’s admirers won’t mind, though those unfamiliar with the commentator will wonder at the oddness of it all.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-773-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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