You’ll be forgiven for thinking that a place in national politics or pro hockey would be a more restful and attainable...
A coked-up Capote, a torn-apart Tartt, a bellowing Bellow: longtime Vanity Fair editor Carter assembles shimmering pieces on the literary life.
Founded in 1913, Vanity Fair, writes Carter, was “immediately a hothouse for literary talent.” Eleven decades later, it continues to draw some of the most prominent names in literature, who here offer a kind of informal genealogy of contemporary American letters, looking at shared influences and inspirations. For instance, when One Hundred Years of Solitude burst on the scene in the 1960s, Toni Morrison, then an acquisitions editor, had an early look and decided to jump ship and dedicate herself to writing. “I got permission from García Márquez,” she says by way of Paul Elie’s lively history of the book, to write Song of Solomon. Junot Díaz, Salman Rushdie, and John Irving also took their own cues from the Colombian writer’s pages. Less influential figures pop up in the anthology as well, including the now unjustly forgotten Ward Just, who arrived in Washington, D.C., and, by David Halberstam’s account, made the Atlantic Seaboard into “Just Country”: “he was struck,” writes Halberstam, “by the contrast between the Kennedy people, so coolly arrogant and eager to rule not just America but also the world, and the seemingly doddering Eisenhower people, most of them older businessmen, who could hardly wait to return to the bland comforts of the Midwest.” Like Just, some of the writers will seem like figures from ancient history at first, but their later contemporaries at Vanity Fair bring them back to life. Dorothy Parker, writes the late Christopher Hitchens, “did not forsake her habit of stretching like a feline and then whipping out with a murderous paw.” All, subjects and writers alike, are people whose company a literary-minded reader will seek, and all are richly present here.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking that a place in national politics or pro hockey would be a more restful and attainable aspiration, but this collection is essential to anyone thinking of taking up the writer’s trade.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-311176-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2016
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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