Laurels to the lady who can make laughter for others and capital for herself of what many might term miseries, whether they be the misadventures of chicken ranching- combined with marriage to the wrong man, a term in a TB sanitarium, or- as in this latest, job sampling in the depression, a charming mother whose ideas of finances were, to put it mildly, erratic, and a sister who could rub her Aladdin's lantern and produce almost any thing for her sister to do, from blind dates to eccentric jobs. Mary and "My Sister Eil" had many traits in common, but Mary had an imagination gifted in setting the pace- and facility in stopping out from under while Betty took the punishment. There's a beguiling first chapter which ties this book of adventures and misadventures in with the childhood background of a mining engineer's household. The author then skips the years recorded in The and I tells of her hasty departure from the hated ranch, and then regales her readers with side splitting accounts of her job hunts, with Mary as arbiter. Told in dialogue and almost deadpan narrative, they make highly entertaining reading. The book is substantially longer than the samples which ran in the SEP as It All Happened To Me.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1950
ISBN: 1888173289
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1950
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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