A book that is going to cause some annoyance and much discussion. Is Alice B. Toklas a real person? Yes, she is, very much so, secretary and companion and close friend of Certrude Stein for many years. Why the title? Because Alice Toklas was always threatening to write her autobiography, which, Gertrude Stein knew, would in essence be her biography, based on a close intimacy. When the writing was postponed repeatedly, Gertrude Stein announced that she would do it herself. This is the result. This the title. Explain it to your customers if you can. The text is really Gertrude Stein's autobiography, though it gives a delightful background of Alice Toklas, a background of sympathy, cooperation, friendship, and life made up of little things such as cooking and sewing, and making the wheels go round. As a biography of Gertrude it is fascinating. One gots a vivid swift picture of a childhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and in Europe; of college days at Radcliffe and at Johns Hopkins studying medicine. After 1907 she lived with her brother in Paris and one meets Piccasso, Matisse, Juan Cris — the moderns who were trying to make the world see what they saw. And there were many from the writing world, too, Sherwood Anderson, Van Vechten and others. She was always writing, always worried because the world did not understand her. So lucid and sympathetic a study is this, that one feels one could go back to her writings and understand them now. There is no affectation here, none of the stream of consciousness method. Intensely interesting, and should have more than a moderate sale.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1933
ISBN: 067972463X
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1933
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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