A lovely and sometimes lyrical work of imagination that rests on a solid foundation of scholarship. (8 pages b&w photos)
A skillful, imaginative exploration of the life of a 19th-century French stonemason who, with ferocious determination, transformed himself into a potent political force.
Tindall (Célestine, 1996, etc.) begins this remarkable work on a spring morning in rural central France in 1830. Fourteen-year-old Martin Nadaud is leaving his home to accompany his father and uncle and, eventually, thousands of other masons who walk north to Paris each spring (“like migrant birds”) to work until fall. The author evokes an itinerant way of life now largely forgotten (though not gone. (As she points out, other cultures continue sending their men into the cities to establish themselves.) Tindall scoured archives and public records for the few facts they held and acknowledges that she felt at times as if she were assembling a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing; she worried that even “some of those that survive may not actually belong.” Using these slim records, she constructs a sturdy framework for Nadaud’s life. Martin’s father had insisted the boy learn to read (a rare skill in his day), and the young man helped pay off family debts by contributing not only his laborer’s wages but also the money he earned teaching other laborers to read in an informal night school he operated. In Paris, Martin met politicians interested in workers’ rights and, after one failure, he was elected to parliament in 1849. The rise of Louis-Napoleon, however, led to Martin’s 1851 arrest and 1852 exile. He ended up in England, where (after working once again as a mason) he began a 12-year career teaching French at a boys’ school in Wimbledon. In a “triumphant reversal of fortune,” he returned to France and became an important public official in his native Creuse.
A lovely and sometimes lyrical work of imagination that rests on a solid foundation of scholarship. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26185-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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