A soberly investigated picaresque life of the barfly author of Notes of a Dirty Old Man. For those critics who felt that Bukowski buddy Neeli Cherkovski’s colorful but less than rigorous Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (1991) lacked objective distance, London journalist Sounes has enough to offset his hero-worship of the womanizing, dipsomaniacal, down-and-out poet-novelist. Bukowski is probably best known from his self-portrait of an alcoholic in the movie Barfly, but his almost lifelong problems with alcohol, money, women, an abusive father, and a menial job at the post office never slowed a prolific output of poems, short stories, and novels. With such a disreputably mythic author, whose works are both transparently autobiographical and scabrously candid, this book’s task is not to dig up dirt on the subject, but to find out which dirt is the real dirt. Sounes, whose previous book, the true crime Fred & Rose (not reviewed), detailed a respectable married couple’s mass killings, steadies stories of Bukowski’s outrageous antics (getting beer cans thrown at him during a boozy poetry reading, for instance) with the dogged journalistic work of tracing paper trails, from public records to Bukowski’s correspondence and unpublished writing, and interviewing his surviving family, friends, colleagues, and ex-girlfriends. Some (self-perpetuated) myths are brought down quickly, such as Bukowski’s illegtimacy. Other revelations give more substance to the Bukowski legend, such as how careful he was in fact with his money even when playing the horses, how dedicated he was to his writing even when he couldn’t hold down a steady job during the “barfly” years, and how close he really was to being fired when he finally quit the post office to write full-time. Despite its often fannish tone, a biography that listens to Bukowski’s all-night barroom anecdotes and then checks the facts the morning after. (b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1645-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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