Readers of Wouk will delight in accompanying him through his triumphs and grief.
Gently meandering work about writing and remembrance by a beloved American sage and author.
A kind of tongue-in-cheek anti-autobiography, this slender memoir by Wouk (The Lawgiver, 2012, etc.) divides his writing life and influences since he was 12 years old in 1927 (“the year ‘Lucky’ Lindbergh flew over the ocean nonstop to Paris”) between “Sailor,” or how his itinerant real life insinuated itself in his work, and “Fiddler,” the spiritual journey of his later years, as he plunged into Judaism and the saga of Israel. His longtime wife and literary agent (since deceased) used to read everything that he wrote and pounced on his idea of writing his autobiography by reminding him skeptically, “you’re not that interesting a person.” Wouk’s roots as a comedy writer pop up throughout the book. Having grown up in a Bronx Jewish household to Yiddish-speaking parents—his steam-laundry boss Papa regaled the family Friday nights with his readings of Shalom Aleichem—Wouk was steeped early on in folk humor and resolved to be a gagman, hired by “gag czar” David Freedman and then Fred Allen. By 1943, he was scrawling the first page of his first novel, Aurora Dawn (1947), aboard a minesweeper and became a rather accidental novelist, or so he writes about his advance for The Caine Mutiny (1951)—he was “bemused by this windfall of bucks.” Indeed, the author can barely grasp the effort that certainly charged his monumental works of fiction, starting with “the first novel about American Jewry,” Marjorie Morningstar, which put him on the cover of Time. Wouk was first moved to write about the Holocaust by reading Raul Hilberg; from there, he plunged into the “main task,” aka the World War II books. His “Fiddler” years led him to the autobiographical Inside, Outside (1985) and to years of intensive military research for The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994)—“it’s expected of you,” he was told.
Readers of Wouk will delight in accompanying him through his triumphs and grief.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2854-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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