Lucid, sardonic, exciting, if more than slightly immature.
In four years as a photojournalist, Kogan charged into the world’s most dangerous places and fell in love with men from all over the northern hemisphere. Now in her 30s, she has written a smart-mouthed professional and sexual memoir.
Raised in Potomac, Maryland (a stable, functional period she covers in flashbacks), Kogan graduated from Harvard, moved immediately to Paris, and signed with a major photo agency. As a young, petite blonde, she was sent alone to photograph warring mujahideen in rural Afghanistan, heroin addicts in northern Europe, jungle scuffles in Zimbabwe, and the fall of Communism in Russia and Romania. She was never alone for long: each chapter in her chronology is named whatever man she was obsessed with at the time, and there were plenty more besides these. Her professional life is fascinating—and her photos of Romanian orphans are unforgettable—but she seems more concerned with romance, and keeps returning to the subject again and again in the best adolescent style. Kogan is a brilliant, clear-headed writer, breezing through details and dialogue as though each event happened yesterday, and creating real suspense through age-appropriate voice shifts: she recounts her early 20s in four-letter words, then gradually softens as she crosses that decade and grows up. The present-tense narrative alternates nicely with out-of-order flashbacks triggered by theme. To her credit, this senior member of Gen X never takes herself too seriously; if the last chapter leaves an odd aftertaste, it’s the sense that Kogan does not appreciate the rarity of a life of adventure and nonstop romance. Especially for readers with wanderlust, the book is an ideal companion to journalist Geraldine Brooks’s Foreign Correspondence (1997)—younger and tougher, but driven by a similar life trajectory.
Lucid, sardonic, exciting, if more than slightly immature.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50364-1
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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