Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach...
A middling entry in the run of recent books on calendars, meridians, and like inventions.
Canadian novelist and memoirist Blaise (I Had a Father, 1993) turns his attention to the largely unknown Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railroad entrepreneur who foresaw the need to develop a system of standard time that would accommodate increasingly rapid travel. Until Fleming’s innovations were put in place, time was a matter of almost individual interpretation; in the 1880s, for instance, Bostonians set their watches 12 minutes ahead of New Yorkers, with strange effects on railroad timetables. Fleming’s development of a universal system, which included the proposal that the day opens far out in the Pacific along a longitude that no nation could claim, eliminated such hiccups, and much of it remains in place today; as the author observes, “Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest.” Arriving at that standard time, however, required endless calculation and a surprising level of international political haggling. Blaise is quite good at describing the arcana of timekeeping, and he has a deep knowledge of the cultural history of an era in which technological revolution was an almost daily commonplace. But, perhaps belying his English-professor past, he offers a narrative that is clotted with asides on what poets and novelists have had to say about the matter of time (“Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa have taken Faulknerian time, Proustian time, the Catholic calendar, and even a bit of pre-Columbian aboriginal time to keep history alive for the creation of their own sophisticated myths of eternal return”)—asides that have precious little bearing on his ostensible subject and seem designed only to show off the his trove of literary allusions.
Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach the story’s end.Pub Date: April 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40176-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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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