Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious...
An award-winning biographer reveals his troubled past.
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bailey (Creative Writing/Old Dominion Univ.; Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, 2013, etc.) justifies his attraction to alcoholic subjects (John Cheever, Richard Yates, Charles Jackson) in this bleak, repetitious memoir. Bailey’s father was Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, his mother, a hard drinker trying to revive, in the Midwest, her bohemian Greenwich Village youth. Bailey and his older brother, Scott, became heavy drinkers in high school, even before their parents divorced, an event that disrupted an already strained family. Scott’s problems, though, went beyond drunkenness: At one point, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis that Bailey rejects—though he offers no other explanation for his brother’s erratic behavior, grandiose riffs, addictions, violence and ultimate suicide. Bailey chronicles Scott’s descent, but also notes that he, too, was an alcoholic. Scott, however, supplemented alcohol with various other drugs, including heroin. Their frustrated parents sometimes lashed out angrily, sometimes coddled their troubled sons. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white,” his mother told Bailey after Scott threatened to kill her. “There’s a little gray!” Some of Scott’s escapades seem like plots from a Cheever story: Scott “liked being in other people’s houses,” sneaking in during the night and staying for hours; in summer, he would “skulk around the suburbs,” bolting into family barbecues, stabbing meat and running off with it. The title of this memoir comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark’s 1969 “Yesterday When I was Young”: “…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.”
Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-23957-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
