Like the city itself, the book mashes wildly diverse sources into an intriguing and surprising whole.
A Los Angeles native and lion of the city’s literary culture gathers writers’ impressions of the City of Angels from across several centuries.
Editor Kipen (Writing/UCLA; The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, 2006, etc.), the creator of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program, is a longtime champion of books as a way of forging community. Here, he uses the written word to give readers a complex portrait of “the Italy of America—no wait, we’re the capital of the Third World—hang on, now we’re the Ellis Island of the West. What next? Yesterday’s hyperbole is tomorrow’s ephemera.” For the format of the book, Kipen took inspiration from Teresa Carpenter’s New York Diaries (2012), spending seven years scouring the diaries, journals, letters, and, occasionally, blogs, tweets, and speeches of people who lived in or visited LA. With almost 500 years of entries, the book covers a lot of territory, from the small mission town under Spanish rule to the Hollywood glamour of the 20th century and the teeming multicultural city of today. Kipen selects one (or usually more) excerpt written on each day of the year, which leads to numerous revelatory, odd, and entertaining juxtapositions. Jan. 7, for example: In an 1861 letter, botanist William H. Brewer complained about 70 straight hours of rain, while in 2017, actor Ryan Reynolds tweeted, “People in LA are deathly afraid of gluten. I swear to god, you could rob a liquor store in this city with a bagel.” In a 1926 letter, Valeria Belletti, Sam Goldwyn’s secretary, exulted that she finally persuaded her boss to take a look at “that boy I raved to you about, Gary Cooper.” Kipen also includes entries from a wide-ranging assortment of writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Octavia Butler, Susan Sontag, and Truman Capote.
Like the city itself, the book mashes wildly diverse sources into an intriguing and surprising whole.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9398-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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