Gifford's baffling but enjoyable memoir of his father, a Chicago bookmaker and hoodlum, is stitched together with material from his earlier books and, admittedly, ``contains elements of fiction'' and is ``somewhat embroidered and colored.'' It's not always easy to discern the factual from the apocryphal, but novelist Gifford's (Baby Cat-Face, 1995, etc.) lively material makes that beside the point: Rudy Winston, owner of the Lake Shore Liquor and Drug Store at the corner of Chicago and Rush streets, was a fascinating, elusive character. Rudy ``was a good man to know,'' as they said. During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, he had connections to everybody from John Dillinger to Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. Willie ``The Hero'' Nero and Johnny Reata, a man reputed to have made his money running guns to the Dominican Republic, were among his known associates. His own rap sheet was fairly modest, the worst being a one-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to the receipt of stolen goods. Gifford writes of all this in short takes, with some pieces scarcely mentioning his father, focusing instead on his oft-married mother (she divorced Rudy when Gifford was five years old); or his ``listening to the news'' on the radio, i.e., ``the real news of blues, jazz and R&B''; or his penchant for telling wild stories as a child. Gifford catalogues his own set of misfit associates: Cueball Bluestein, who became a hitman for Dodo Saltimocca; Chuck Syracuse, a teenage cab driver who torched his own taxi so the dispatcher couldn't read the meter; Magic Frank, with whom he spent time at Bebop's Pool Hall. But mostly, it's about a father who took him to ball games and the fights, or brought him along on the occasional mysterious trip to small town to ``see a man on business.'' Perhaps appropriately, Gifford riffles through these images of his ``phantom'' father as if they were old photographs of someone he scarcely knew.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100250-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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