A rich trove for literary archaeologists in search of artifacts from the Beat epoch.
An informative, comprehensive account of one woman’s rise in the literary underground, ripe with the flavors and transformations of the Beat Generation.
San Francisco poet di Prima (Loba, not reviewed) is considered the most prominent woman among the “beatniks” (Corso, Kerouac, Ginsberg et al.) of the 1950s. Her unconventional career, however, was hardly forecast by a 1930s girlhood filled with violence and foreboding, in which the bright child was alternately confused and tormented by her strict Italian family and the cruel Brooklyn streets. After an unsatisfying year at Swarthmore, she dropped out and began to move with a small circle of estranged nonconformists in rundown Manhattan locales, where they experimented with sex, drugs, and art. The author brings a relentless acuity to her depiction of sensual, chaotic times, and she is astute in her portrayal of the awkward place women occupied in this bohemian hierarchy. She produces a sharp sense of the creative collisions of the day—involving figures as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Le Roi Jones, Charlie Parker, Merce Cunningham, Martin Landau, and Audre Lorde—and of the Beats’ sense of embattlement against a repressive city and police. While not exactly stream-of-consciousness, strongly evocative passages alternate throughout with ones that might have been trimmed. Many of the recollections of di Prima’s early years are warm and affectionate, as are her reminiscences of her first lover (a gentle, literate longshoreman twice her age). The author also details her circle’s founding of important small presses, theater companies, and other cultural outlets.
A rich trove for literary archaeologists in search of artifacts from the Beat epoch.Pub Date: April 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-85166-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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