Repetitive and rambling, but tat fanatics will dig it.
If you like permanent body art, welcome aboard. If you’re scared of needles, run away.
These days, with a tattoo parlor in nearly every suburban mall, as well as the success of the Discovery Channel’s L.A. Ink, among other reality-TV shows, body art is just about as common and widely accepted as ear piercings. Johnson—an old-school stalwart from the Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, Portland, Ore.’s oldest tattoo parlor—is more than qualified to write a memoir about the tattooing life, and he seeks to “give the reader a more complete picture of a tattoo artist’s life and the lessons learned along the way, the things that a TV show or a visit to your local establishment can’t capture.” However, the character sketches of the oddball customers and itinerant artists that inhabit the Sea Tramp, while initially engaging, eventually become tiresome. Sure, stories about misspelled words inked onto some poor sap’s bicep and women seducing horny male artists into giving them free work are interesting anecdotes. But when compiled in book form, they tend to blur together, and Johnson’s authorial skills aren’t quite up to the task of threading them together into a meaningful narrative. Readers with a casual interest in body art will find something to enjoy, but those seeking a book that simply introduces them to a new world would be better off looking elsewhere.
Repetitive and rambling, but tat fanatics will dig it.Pub Date: July 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-53052-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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