Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing...
More autobiographical sketches, in no particular order, from Chicago graphic artist Brown (Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations, 2007, etc.).
From the previously published first chapter, “These Things These Things,” through the finale, “A Tiny Piece of Myself,” the prolific author covers roughly the last four years of his small-scale experiences. A reader would have to be well acquainted with his personal life to see much of a progression from one year to the next; Brown’s graphic recollections can seem random and ordinary, and no doubt that’s intentional. The always hirsute and bedraggled artist makes the rounds in one story after another: drawing at Earwax coffeeshop, selling CDs at Barnes & Noble, listening to music, dealing with his cat, having touch-and-go romances that involve lots of waiting for phone calls and parsing of signals, not to mention negotiating dilemmas like whether to romance “smartie” or “cutie.” The art is lo-fi in the extreme, with cramped framing and people who look like the sort of hunched caricatures another artist might doodle in the margins before moving on to the main event. The book’s dialogue will win no awards, resorting often to a Seinfeld-ian blah blah blah method of elision. Chapters like the long-winded “Missing the Mountains,” in which he goes hiking and plays Scrabble with a friend, sometimes give Brown’s memoir the air of a chronically low-achieving slacker’s take on the form—i.e., exert as little effort as possible. But the bulk of the pieces charm with their off-kilter humor and sad-sack tales of the lovelorn, such as the brilliantly self-deprecating mini-essay, “How to Meet a Girl.”
Unprepossessing but also winning snapshots of varying (non)importance from an unremarkable life that pretends to be nothing but. Could easily appeal to those new to the genre.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4946-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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