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SPRING AND AUTUMN ANNALS

Name: SPRING AND AUTUMN ANNALS
Author: Diane di Prima
ISBN: 978-0-87286-880-9

A CELEBRATION OF THE SEASONS FOR FREDDIE

by Diane di Prima ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2021

A useful document for scholars of the Beat generation.

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A Beat poet’s journal following the suicide of her closest friend encompasses many seasons and cycles of life and death.

For decades, di Prima (The Poetry Deal, 2014, etc.) has provided an important female perspective on a Beat generation whose best-known figures have been male. This volume, studded with beautiful moments but often scattershot, began as letters she wrote daily to dancer and Andy Warhol acolyte Freddie Herko, who leapt to his death from a window when he was 29, leaving many projects and plans unfulfilled. “I pray now that your third love came, in silver shoes, and veiled, that she glittered and danced for you, a boy-girl, a child with the secrets,” writes the author. “That you followed her out the window.” More likely, Herko’s death was caused by a combination of amphetamine-fueled desperation or insanity. “You cleaned yourself, you danced, you shed your flesh,” writes di Prima. “A leap that bought the new age and turned us loose.” With evocative detail and introspective insight, she writes of that loss and the feeling of being turned loose, occasionally unmoored, struggling to create art through years of living in barely habitable apartments. She also writes, often in a fractured manner, about how her marriage to the man who had been Herko’s partner was troubled from the start. She conceived a child with another man and ended that pregnancy with an abortion that continued to haunt her. She went to Timothy Leary’s wedding, copy edited Herbert Huncke, took LSD, wrote poems, and made plays. She saw the beatniks and their bongos give way to the hippies, “hairier than the old. They are wreathed in perpetual, goony, elaborate grins.” She fell deeply in love with other women, though most relationships seemed to be troubled, transitory, or both. “Peter took refuge downstairs, we spoke mythologies. We sniffed cocaine together, Peter buying. Peter set out for India. Returned in two months, tanned and older, moved in with me. We set out to get married, but we failed.”

A useful document for scholars of the Beat generation.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-87286-880-9

Page Count: 210

Publisher: City Lights

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.