This companion anniversary volume to Remnick’s short-story anthology Wonderful Town (p. 1912) collects 25 of the biographical Profiles that have long been a hallmark of The New Yorker. From Wolcott Gibbs’s parody of Henry Luce’speak (—Best advice: Don—t. . . . Where it all will end, knows God!—) to Lillian Ross’s poker-faced visit with celebrity Ernest Hemingway (—How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?—) to Richard Preston’s report on the Chudnovsky brothers, a pair of mathematicians obsessed with calculating the value of pi, the profiles not only showcase the immense range of the magazine’s interests (their method could be described as nosiness aspiring to the condition of art) but provide an endlessly fascinating catalog of the variety of attitudes profiles can adopt to their subjects. Janet Flanner worships at the shrine of Isadora Duncan; Truman Capote goes several rounds with Marlon Brando in a battle of egoists; Calvin Trillin rides with Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan; Kenneth Tynan sits through round after round of Johnny Carson’s practiced spontaneity; Ian Frazier chats with domestic columnist Heloise; Hilton Als tries to pin down Richard Pryor; John Lahr asks what’s so great about Roseanne Barr; Henry Louis Gates examines Anatole Broyard’s flight from himself. Taken together, the collection amounts to a mordantly amusing meditation on the varieties of fame in 20th-century America.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50355-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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