This brief in favor of reading is every bit as gooey and obvious as its title would indicate. Once again we are reminded that a book is like a frigate, that books have made knowledge available to the masses, that there is a certain “despotism of the educated,” an academic snootiness, that disparages popular reading (one of Quindlen’s college professors disdained Galsworthy, a writer Quindlen then adored). While Quindlen professes herself to be democratic in matters of taste, she seems caught in the self-contradiction that is inevitable when one declares that all reading is valuable’serving to expand the mind, heart, and imagination—while also trying to reserve room for the exercise of critical judgment. Still, despite the fact that Pulitzer-winning journalist and novelist Quindlen (One True Thing, 1994; Black and Blue, 1998) is preaching to the choir, she relates some charming and amusing anecdotes, such as the time her mother hurled the latest Book-of-the-Month Club selection across the room, leaving the offensive volume for a teenage Anna to pick up—it was Portnoy’s Complaint: “Didn’t she know that I would . . . [hear] her distress signal as the clarion cry to forbidden fruit?” She astutely goes on to note that “it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive.” From Martin Luther to Betty Friedan, she notes, sedition has been the point of the written word. Her own writing here, alas, lacks both sedition and seduction.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42278-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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