High and low, crushing and comic, indelible as India ink.
Poet Kleinzahler (Green Sees Things in Waves, 1998, etc.) adeptly and frankly chronicles episodes from a strange, unenviable life.
When the author was seven and his brother called him obnoxious, he writes, “I resolved to become a man of letters. If there were words as punishing as this, I wanted my quiver to be full of them.” It is. Kleinzahler comes out of his corner at the reader like a veteran boxer: First there will be some jazzy entertainment and fancy stepping, then he’ll send you a line that stings with nose-bleeding accuracy. We start with his childhood in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He was an unexpected baby—a little too much to drink and “mother became pregnant with me, years after she’d convinced herself she’d beaten that particular rap”—with a sister who lived in the attic, a brother given to mayhem, and parents who would rather be in another room. His neighbors were Murder Inc.’s CEO Albert Anastasia and the Palisades Amusement Park. His saviors were his dog and his brother, who figures in a final chapter that hits like a broadside. “He was born wild, born troubled,” concludes the poet. “He wasn’t designed for the long haul; not everyone is.” Kleinzahler is good with unsettling, epigrammatic flashes, but he can also be mellow, pursuing the syntax of place on a bus ride from San Diego to El Cajon in a piece that proclaims “flânerie, that's my thing,” or capturing his favorite bar, a depressing, cavelike, unfriendly joint called Persian Aub Zam Zam, in a profile that bears comparison with the best of Joseph Mitchell. Drinking provides the autobiographical segue to a thorough mugging of the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and it might also explain his penchant for fistfights and comments like “what really drew me to Melodia . . . was her taste for being tied up and sodomized, all the while muttering prayers in Latin.”
High and low, crushing and comic, indelible as India ink.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-13377-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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