Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to...
A slender but sturdy life of the centrifugal author at home in New York.
Baldwin was many things; consistent is not necessarily one of them. Boyd (Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, 2005) notes that Baldwin was “committed to black radicalism” and a fellow traveler of Malcolm X, yet not so committed to the cause as to endorse younger activists such as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who returned the favor. We meet Cleaver as he and Baldwin were supposedly kissing at a 1967 dinner party in San Francisco, “a graphic contradiction of [Cleaver’s] merciless attack on Baldwin’s homosexuality, or an indication of his own deep-seated sexual ambivalence.” Baldwin advocated racial rapprochement, telling Harlem schoolchildren, “Color doesn’t matter. Color is a political reality which certain politicians use. There is no moral value to black or white skin.” Yet he excused his vigorous anti-Semitism by saying that nearly all blacks in Harlem, after all, hated Jews: “We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building.” Baldwin, writes Boyd, was a student of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and was active in the small literary circle that succeeded the movement. Yet where Cullen was concerned with community-building, Baldwin seems to have thrived on feuds, such as a long-running one with Langston Hughes and, calculated to fuel anti-Semitic sentiments, another fierce one with Norman Mailer. Boyd traces those conflicts to their roots, delivering a refined sort of literary gossip ennobled by substance: We hear, for instance, of Henry Louis Gates’s running argument with Baldwin over whether Harriet Beecher Stowe was a worthy writer, of Amiri Baraka’s dismissal of Baldwin for not being a sufficient revolutionary and so forth.
Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to students of recent American letters.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9307-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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