A vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for...
A memoir from a young “fourteen-dollar-an-hour cog in a thankless deadly wheel.”
For some people in this world, their routines involve drinking beer in lawn chairs set up in the parking lots of small-town hotels, then getting up to climb hundreds of feet into the air to construct and maintain the cellphone networks that the rest of us depend on. It’s dangerous work—the most dangerous job in the world, by the measure on which this narrative hinges, and one that has already taken the lives of many of the people portrayed here. In 1997, sometime screenwriter and playwright Delaney exchanged the ivory for the steel tower and made his first “tower dog” ascent into the sky over Kansas in freezing weather. “This would not be so bad,” he writes, instantly adding, “But for the next 200 feet and the next eleven hours it was very, very bad.” His fellow climbers are philosophical, if stoically resigned to the pain, discomfort, and danger of their work. They are also masterful technicians, and if nothing else, readers will learn what 4G means and how cellphone towers work. Throughout, the author plays a few writerly tricks, including protesting his writerly status (“I never called myself a writer. I never introduced myself as a writer and I was always uncomfortable when I was introduced as a writer”), but these are minor annoyances in a readable book whose larger import is in depicting a world that very few people would want to explore firsthand, somewhere between the blue-collar and the high-wire. Delaney is unfussy and workmanlike, and if he never attains the philosophical depth of, say, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), he delivers a persuasive, whole-sighted view of a highly specialized pursuit.
A vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for better or worse.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-938-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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