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YOURS, ETC.

Name: YOURS, ETC.
Author: Christopher Hawtree
ISBN: 0140123725

LETTERS TO THE PRESS

edited by Christopher Hawtree & by Graham Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1990

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Greene's letters to editors, unlike those of Evelyn Waugh or Bernard Shaw, seldom trade on the author's public figure—but are most fun when they do, as when Greene wins prizes for his pseudonymous entries in newspaper contests based on parodies of Graham Greene. (He later cannibalized two of the parodies for his own work.) Greene was a former sub-editor of The Times and when ending his four-year stint there was told that, if he stayed and were patient, he might well become correspondence editor. Greene later said that if he had stayed, "my whole life would have been changed disastrously for the better." For American readers, though, he will be most readable here when defending his cuts in Shaw for Otto Preminger's film St. Joan, and when standing up for rights of British audiences to see Pygmalion when a ten-year ban on the play was put in force to keep My Fair Lady on the boards. Other lively moments arise when he takes on journalists who misquote or falsify his words during interviews (but does anyone really remember the Penelope Gilliatt brouhaha in The New Yorker?). He is most sharp-tongued about US foreign policy in Central America and the Far East. Also of interest are his bouts with censors, especially the BBC, which wanted nine cuts in his play The Complaisant Lovers. Greene took this as censorship, but the BBC said it was to bring the play in at 90 minutes broadcast time. He also often defends himself against unfair statements about his Catholicism. Many of his political letters, however, will be of small interest to American readers of his fiction. Less waspish than Waugh, less brilliant than Shaw.

Pub Date: May 1, 1990

ISBN: 0140123725

Page Count: 268

Publisher: Reinhardt/Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.