A moving and unflinching paean to a man who died at the top of his game: “Sort of a mic drop, really.”
Life with father isn’t easy—not when father is the one-time drug addict David Carr, noted journalist and author of the searing memoir Night of the Gun (2008).
Documentary filmmaker Carr delivers an affecting memoir of growing up under decidedly difficult circumstances—e.g., being left in a freezing car in her snowsuit while her father checked into a crack den to get high. But that’s just part of it. Carr the elder turned his life around when it dawned on him that two unhealthy parents were not good for two budding daughters, even if he sublimated his addictions with too many cigarettes, too much coffee, and too much work in the quest for the Pulitzer Prize that, as a reporter and critic for the New York Times, always eluded him. The combination, plus the years of hard living, killed him: “58,” writes the author. “Who dies that young? No one had ever prepared me for his dying that young.” True, but he did prepare his daughter well for life as a writer, giving her the same lessons he gave to his many university students about being honest with oneself and working the phones rather than relying on email. “What will set you apart,” he wrote, “is not talent but will and a certain kind of humility, a willingness to let the world show you things that you play back as you grow as an artist. Talent is cheap.” Carr is relentless in describing the chemical failings that the world revealed to her, especially in reliance on alcohol, which she’s quit. She’s also very good in distilling the lessons her father taught her without being sentimental: “When it comes time to pimp your own stuff, you have credibility” is vintage Carr, in all its tough-guy–ism, and ought to inspire other young would-be journalists and writers as they pay their dues.
A moving and unflinching paean to a man who died at the top of his game: “Sort of a mic drop, really.”Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-17971-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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