An unabashed reminiscence that never fully coheres.
A familiar coming-of-age memoir about a young New Yorker who dreams of literary success.
“What a great, noble thing,” Tuten (Self-Portraits: Fictions, 2010, etc.) declares, “to give your life to art.” In short, nostalgic vignettes dating back as early as 1944, the author, a winner of the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recounts two decades of maturation and intellectual posturing throughout his formative years in New York. Before becoming a novelist, screenwriter, and art critic, Tuten was determined in his youth to become “part of the world that [he] had read about in novels.” After a brief foray into painting, he was drawn to literature and so began the life of an aspiring writer. Although he never made it to la vie boheme in Paris, he repeatedly attempted to emulate a European lifestyle at home. He smoked “unfiltered Gauloises, like the French intellectuals,” and his vision of “the artist’s life” is one of “books, music, art, and a beautiful woman.” As he recalls, “I dreamed of instant fame, a book contract, and the waitress at Figaro noticing me.” Tuten pairs this relatable naiveté with too many tales of girlfriends and sexual exploits, but this is appropriate from an author who once considered Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be “a manifesto for my liberty.” The author’s intellectual ambitions, while compelling and at times inspirational, are not particularly unique. The memoir’s perfunctory finish reveals the lack of any substantive arc and suggests Tuten could have wandered through more memories if he had felt so inclined. The author’s life was unquestionably exciting—he published acclaimed novels, taught with Paul Bowles in Tangiers, worked on films, and befriended Roy Lichtenstein—but these stories are relegated to the occasional endnote, if addressed at all. Perhaps they are being saved for a more exciting follow-up.
An unabashed reminiscence that never fully coheres.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9445-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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
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