Blends the techniques of film and fiction into a strong, evocative memoir.
Literate film buff Thomson (The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, 2004, etc.) recalls his early days.
Readers of such magisterial efforts as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2002) will recognize the rich, cadenced prose that has distinguished the author’s work throughout his career. The memoir begins in South London, where Thomson came of age as World War II ended. He recalls his grandmother teasing him with the notion that Hitler was hiding out at the local common; he half-believed her as he ran off into the hardscrabble streets. Thomson joined friends to play in the bombed-out shells of houses whose staircases stopped in midair and to wave at Churchill as his motorcade passed by in a victory celebration. Sharp portraits of his education at private and public schools follow. He doesn’t remember the very first “picture” he saw: Olivier’s Henry V was an early one, in 1945, and he recalls playing hooky later on to see Red River and The Third Man. Thomson almost rhapsodizes as he describes how Citizen Kane brought his life into focus, his passion for film and a certain young woman blossoming simultaneously. The content and imagery of Thomson’s work recall Hope and Glory, John Boorman’s autobiographical film about postwar Britain, but the core and tone are less nostalgic, more that of a gritty black-and-white drama with a turbulent family triangle at its core. Thomson’s father abandoned the family early on but returned on some holidays and weekends to take his son to the movies, moments the boy treasured. Dad was both duplicitous (he lived secretly with another woman) and treacherous; he ruthlessly cut his son out of a deserved inheritance. The wounds of their breach haunt Thomson to the book’s close, when he muses over a false mustache that belonged to his father, a sometime actor who in life and at the cinema led his son to both pain and pleasure.
Blends the techniques of film and fiction into a strong, evocative memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41213-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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