Literary gossip, and catnip for book junkies.
A Canadian journalist who lived for a time at famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. tells the story of its iconoclastic owner and his destitute but mostly merry band of boarders.
Reporting on crime in Ottawa was getting Mercer down, so when he received what could have been a death threat one night from a disgruntled subject of one of his stories, the author was more than ready to leave his old life and flee to Paris. The City of Light was charming, and Mercer wasn't ready to leave when the money ran out, so he did what countless other writers had done before him: shacked up at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, trading a little bit of service in the store for a bed (but not a bath—ablutions were performed at the spacious facilities of a nearby cafe). There Mercer got to know owner George Whitman and many of the characters who over the years drifted into the store and never left. Luckily for the literary freeloaders, Whitman (no relation to Walt) was a committed, lifelong communist, a man determined to put his ideals into action by sharing what he had—a roof—with the have-nots. Mercer, a fresh and eager face, quickly became the old man's confidante. He learned about Whitman's personal history, his goals for the store and the idiosyncratic methods of penny-pinching that allowed him to operate a free hostel for the well-read set. Mercer is a genial, wide-eyed guide to the wild crew at the store, and although he eventually became somewhat disillusioned with Whitman, his affection and admiration for what the man has accomplished are clear.
Literary gossip, and catnip for book junkies.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34739-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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