The successor to Booknotes: Writers and Their Stories from C-SPAN’s Author Interviews (1997) is more unified and satisfying. Scouring ten years of interviews from his C-SPAN program, Lamb has assembled a collection of subjects spanning three centuries and two continents. While the emphasis falls on US statesmen and public figures (Will Rogers, Thomas Edison), international names like Marcel Proust and F.A. Hayek also appear, as well as a young heroin addict named Rosa Lee Cunningham. The focus on one genre unifies the work neatly, and insights into the subjects and biographers keep the work surprising. For example, Susan B. Anthony was a youthful beauty; Rutherford B. Hayes is an underappreciated president who prefigured the Progressive era; Calvin Coolidge was a fine writer, even in the opinion of Mencken. Common threads among the biographers are many. One is time invested: several years is not uncommon. Another is intimacy with the subject. The result for some, like Walter Isaacson (on Henry Kissinger), is equivocation: praise for Kissinger’s “ability to understand linkages in foreign policy,” but criticism of his shortsightedness in not grasping the power of “the openness and the values of our [democratic] system.” For others there is a fearful closeness. Sylvia Jukes Morris dreamed for months of her subject Clare Boothe Luce, with one dream making Luce a stripper in a vaudeville show, ready to expose herself as Morris was exposing her in the biography. But many left their books with increased respect for their subject. “I think I would have loved him,” said Denis Bryan of Albert Einstein. Concluded David McCullough of Harry S. Truman, “I would not only vote for him, I’d go out and work hard to see that he was elected. . . . He accomplished things.” Everyone in the book’subjects and biographers—accomplished things, and their endeavors make this book appealing. (Author tour,)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3081-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
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