Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why...
An autumn-of-life exercise in taking stock by the renowned Mexican novelist and essayist (Inez, 2002, etc.).
“I believe in Balzac,” writes Fuentes. “Next to Cervantes and Faulkner, he is the novelist who has influenced me the most.” Fuentes avows belief in many other things, too: in at least a modicum of essential goodness in Homo sapiens; in Shakespeare and Faulkner; in love that, because mature and real and all-embracing, also contains some element of evil; in the “warm breasts of the girls in Boulder, Colorado”; in the possibility of his fellow Mexicans one day casting aside the “legend of the defeated” and taking their rightful place in the world (after all, Mexico is five times the size of France); in friendship, although all friendships are doomed to end one day; and in sundry odd other matters. Anyone who has kept up with Fuentes’s work over the last five decades will find some expected notes: a love verging on worship of other writers, most memorably expressed in passages on encountering Thomas Mann in Zurich; a conviction that reason will one day point the way toward our getting out of the various messes that we get ourselves into. But there are surprises here, too, and even a few puzzles: a head-scratching moment when Fuentes recalls holding an infant daughter, another where he propagates a novel view of one particularly well-known figure in history (“Jesus does not resurrect the dead. He revives the living. Jesus is the copy editor of human life”). All these opinions, centripetal and centrifugal, are developed to greater or lesser degrees: sometimes Fuentes turns in whole essays, crisply written and self-contained, in defense of one thesis or another; at other times he offers up crystalline apothegms surrounded by not much of anything in particular.
Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why Fuentes has been so well regarded all these years.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6246-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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