After editing collections of Ciardi's letters and poetry, Cifelli offers a record of Ciardi's accomplished life. As this diligently detailed biography shows, though Ciardi (who died in 1986) never got his long-hoped-for Pulitzer or a mandatory place in the anthologies, he compensated with a career that was lengthy, varied, and industrious—not to mention profitable. Ciardi, who became one of America's wealthier men of letters, was born in 1916 to an immigrant Italian family whose modest means were further diminished by his father's early death. A series of awards and useful contracts sped Ciardi's climb. He received the Hopwood Prize while a graduate student at the University of Michigan, gained an early contract with the New Yorker, secured teaching jobs at Harvard and Rutgers, and struck an editorial alliance with Twayne Publishers. On his elevation to directorship of the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Robert Frost wrote to him in 1956, ``By all signs [God] is playing you for one of his favorite boys, professor, publisher, lecturer, director, and accepted poet''—which left out Ciardi's success as the translator of an immensely popular, distinctly American version of Dante's Divine Comedy. Cifelli omits nothing in tracing the arc of Ciardi's life in letters, even noting the later dips, such as the negligible reception of his personal favorite among his books, Lives of X, and his ouster at Bread Loaf in 1972. Although Cifelli is less a narrator than a documenter, his use of Ciardi's letters, poems, and autobiographical fragments (and even his FBI file, begun in Ciardi's leftist days) makes up a more than adequate portrait, particularly of his wartime experience as a B-29 gunner in the Pacific theater and his contentious tenure as poetry editor of the Saturday Review. Never part of any movement or school, except perhaps that of craftsmanship, Ciardi's busy life spanned many hectic decades, and Cifelli provides a lively record of the man and his times. (31 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-55728-448-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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