A chronicle of travels through a bygone world.
A buoyant, bittersweet and often plaintively gorgeous travel memoir by Raney, writer and founder of the famous Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Raney’s debut book follows the arc of a yearlong expedition around the world, launched in 1967, at the height of “the summer of love in a summer of death.” In San Francisco, where the author lived with his wife JoAnne, hippies and beatniks flooded the streets, and new reports arrived every day from the bloody conflict in Vietnam. The couple decided to decamp for Europe, where the dollar was strong and the possibilities seemed endless. Along for the ride is Tarzan, a fiery dachshund, and a baby boy named Eric Xerxes Raney, known as Zerky. For a while, this quirky little family made its way across the Continent, camping in open fields, cavorting on beaches and scrambling through the Swiss Alps. The narrative is built on letters Raney wrote to Zerky–who would presumably be too young to remember the breadth of these adventures–and diary entries by JoAnne, a fastidious chronicler of the far-flung. “That there might be a world beyond Europe, a world you could drive to, was something that never occurred to us until six months later,” the author remembers, near the beginning of the book. Soon enough, the Raneys caterwauled through Turkey, Pakistan, India and Iran–a journey that would prove difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate in these pitched political times. In Kabul, Afghanistan, they vividly pick their “way through random passageways and alleyways that were left between buildings at the time of their construction.” In Eastern Turkey, they face down a gaggle of armed and angry soldiers. The adventure quotient here is high, but the main ballast of the book is emotional. Shortly after returning from the expedition, JoAnne, pregnant with her second child, died of an aneurism, and within a year, Zerky was killed while playing near his family’s home. The book remains as a testament to the power of the human spirit–to wander, endure and remember.
A chronicle of travels through a bygone world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9821384-0-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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