A paean to mechanized flying and a journal of one woman's learning experiences. It is clear from takeoff that poet Ackerman, has only one love greater than flying—the English language. She plain refuses to write a boring sentence. Oh, few of her paragraphs read like a flight through fog and some of her metaphors never leave the ground, but the reader almost always benefits from her willingness to take risks and from her laudable avoidance of clich‚. Written ostensibly to chronicle the education of a poet-pilot and to document one woman's initiation into the wonders of the sky, it is soon apparent that Ackerman's digressions, internal solos and private cross-countries are as valuable a part of the book as her rhapsodically rendered accounts of her actual air time. In fact, the exuberance of her style and voice may at first put the reader off, as Ackerman nearly overwhelms with enthusiasm and passion. Perhaps it is similar to the feeling a first-timer has when confronting the maze of instruments in an airplane's cockpit: there is something wonderful to be learned here if he or she can only get past the basics. Ackerman's writing style holds out the same promise, one that is honestly kept and demonstrally fulfilled. Uplifting, thoughtful, touching and true.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1985
ISBN: 068418835X
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985
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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