A portrait with the ring of truth. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)
A tactfully revealing profile from a biographical master.
One thing is evident from the outset: Edwards (Ever After, 2000, etc.) is a pro at the biography game—without agenda or axe to grind, she forms an opinion from the material at hand. She’s done her spadework and seems to have had a virtual hotline to Nancy Reagan’s diary and occultist, for Nancy receives the lion’s share of attention. Edwards’s conclusion: The Reagan union was one of great affection and protectiveness, not without its share of miscues and emotional blunders, but strong and steady as they go. The author steers clear of politics, keeping, in the best tradition of reporting, an unbiased hand: She’s more interested in the impact of the rumor, for example, that Reagan was an FBI informer while president of the Screen Actors Guild than she is in casting aspersions. The writing is tasteful without being dodgy (“Nancy was not a deep thinker”). Nancy is allowed to speak to her own lame efforts as a mother, while close friends of the couple discuss any drug use, vindictiveness, frenetic behavior, manipulativeness, or untoward preening as first lady. Edwards writes with equal competence about Edward Meese and Michael Deaver as she does about the importance of the White House’s chief usher, reserving her most dramatic storytelling for the day Reagan was shot. Throughout, she is quick and sure in her judgments on loose talk—Nancy had an affair with Frank Sinatra while married to Ronald? Pshaw!—while remaining comfortable also with the politics of Bitburg or Berkeley.
A portrait with the ring of truth. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28500-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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