A useful handbook of a sort, as well as a concluding chapter to his mother’s life.
Death be not proud: an affecting and discomfiting account, by her son, of Susan Sontag’s last days.
As a writer and intellectual, Sontag lived much of her life in public, and often glamorously, courting controversies and participating in literary brawls, jetting back and forth between Paris and New York, filling pages. In private, like her idol, Bulgarian-born novelist Elias Canetti, she feared death inordinately, writing in an early journal of “not being able to even imagine that one day I will no longer be alive.” Having survived one bout with breast cancer, she was amazed, a quarter-century later, to find herself stricken by myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which her doctor, “as if he had a family of village idiots sitting in front of him, [called] a particularly lethal form of blood cancer.” That announcement, writes her son Rieff (At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, 2005, etc.), seems to have stopped Sontag cold, at least for a moment: The woman who had taught herself about the inner workings of volcanoes, epidemics, film, photography and more topics now seemed incurious, particularly about her illness. Rieff wonders, rightly, whether more pointed inquiry would have brought Sontag solace. He concludes that despair would have been the likely outcome, and that his mother’s expectation of him was “an adamant refusal to accept that it was even possible that she might not survive.” She did not, of course, and, as Rieff relates in detail not for the squeamish, hers was not an easy death, for all that she had written wisely and bravely about death in the abstract. Rieff, who admits that he fears dying, writes thoughtfully about a child’s duties in the time of dying.
A useful handbook of a sort, as well as a concluding chapter to his mother’s life.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9946-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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