A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.
A lively biography of an elusive character who manages to sustain reader interest and teach us something about the early-19th-century American pull toward the West.
Journalist Means (The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation, 2006, etc.) finds the lack of hard evidence about the life of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) a liberating way to tell the story of early American migrations. Born in 1774 in Massachusetts, Chapman left home as a young man and headed steadily west, arming himself with apple seeds from cider presses and following waterways and Indian paths into virgin land that he would then clear and border with the seedlings. This constituted the marking of new settlements, and though Chapman speculated in land, he never stayed anywhere long enough to make a profit, but embraced a peripatetic, vegetarian life: “Chapman had the eye of a speculator, the heart of [a] philanthropist, the courage of a frontiersman, and the wandering instincts of a Bedouin nomad. His nature was almost self-canceling.” He was also a zealous evangelical, fond of sitting with an audience to spread the Gospel as shaped by Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Compulsively restless, Chapman kept moving, employing elaborate buying-leasing schemes and often paying in apple trees. Means estimates that during his life, Chapman (who died in 1845) purchased 1,200 acres of “often prime bottom land, plus an assortment of city, town, and village lots.” Why did he do it? Maybe it was to “find the exact seam between past and future, between encroaching civilization and resistant wilderness.” The author examines the making of the Appleseed myth—from the 1871 article by W.D. Haley in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine to Walt Disney’s 1948 cartoon classic Melody Time—as fodder for a country desperate for a model of, as Disney Story Department manager Hal Adelquist wrote, “brotherly love and unselfishness.”
A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7825-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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
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