An altogether fine account of a life spent doing good—and, ultimately, evil.
“To die for your ideas is the most radical of fairy tales”: thus the moral of this evocative portrait by the son and heir of Italian publisher and political activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
Feltrinelli père died in 1972 near Milan while apparently trying to blow up a power pylon, an act of disruption in the near-trademark style of his newfound friends in the Red Brigades. He had lived a fairy-tale life, indeed: the heir to a lumber fortune won in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire, Feltrinelli enjoyed every privilege, was pampered by doting relatives—including a mother who was fond of shooting deer from the rear window of her Rolls-Royce—and was groomed to bring even greater fortune to his family. Whereas Giangiacomo’s father was friendly with the fascist regime (if sometimes critical of “Mussolini and his gang of toadies”), Giangiacomo joined the Communist resistance during WWII and emerged in the postwar era as one of Italy’s most capable political organizers. With the blessing of the Communist Party, he founded the publishing imprint that today bears his name, issuing a list of paperbacks that formed a syllabus for would-be radicals; the first titles he published, in 1955, were Bertrand Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography. Soon thereafter he acquired rights to Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which would likely never have seen print without Feltrinelli’s efforts; Carlo Feltrinelli’s account of the tangled history of the great novel’s publication is among the best there is and will be of great interest to students of dissident literature. The son writes with affection for his father, though he is at a loss to understand how Feltrinelli evolved from more or less orthodox Communist into terrorist, even while refusing to give up his yachts and nice cars and other perquisites of wealth.
An altogether fine account of a life spent doing good—and, ultimately, evil.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100558-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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