Good, acerbic reading imbued with the writerly spirit the author has expressed for nearly half a century.
A working novelist well into his ninth decade, just about the last of the San Francisco Beats, offers a smart and philosophical valedictory.
Gold (Daughter Mine, 2000, etc.) rose to literary fame 41 years ago with the bestselling Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, and his latest—which is pretty much a memoir in the form of a novel—still provides worthy entertainment. He does not, as an octogenarian might, lament the ubiquity of cell phones or the evident collapse of civilization as he once knew it. He writes rather of loss, love and life, focusing on friends who are gone, fleeting encounters and those he long cherished. In no particular chronology, the author flashes back to his excessively politically correct pals in hip California; to his Jewish childhood in Lakewood, Ohio; to Columbia University, where he got some education; and to the Army, where he got some more. He spent time in mythic postwar Paris, an expatriate on the GI Bill hanging with difficult Saul Bellow; he sojourned in Haiti with colorful foreigners. Gold introduces us to the ghosts of his beloved brother, an adored wife and friends heard once again through the tinnitus of accumulated years. He savors the lingering fragrance of the days when he “consented to be very young, very happy.” He recalls the dear children, the divorces and the causes of yesteryear when he was middle-aged. As solipsistic as any memoirist must be, he’s also rather repetitive, but merely for emphasis, he insists.
Good, acerbic reading imbued with the writerly spirit the author has expressed for nearly half a century.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-870-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
