The nonsequential entries make it difficult to chart Hopper’s growth, but that isn’t her game. In this lively and funny...
Down but not out in the hardscrabble Chicago of the 2000s.
Pitchfork writer Hopper (The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, 2015, etc.), who was also a music consultant for This American Life, freestyles her way through the past in this spirited random-access journal of her Chicago days in the early 2000s, when she struggled to get by while taking in the sights. There’s the guy on the roof, peeing into a duct (“Does he know where that duct goes?...Is he a handyman who hates his job?...Is our duct next?”), and the disappointed evangelical who finally loses it. (“Whuddup, bitch? Why didn’t you take a pamphlet? You can just ignore him like that? Huh? Beeitch!”) Hopper mostly got around by bike or foot, subsisted on crummy jobs, attended concerts, and fell in and out of relationships that left her buoyant or bummed out (“I think he thought I was just being vindictive for that time he ruined 1997-2002”). The author doesn’t just observe; she also asks the right questions: “You know how some nights you leave the house wanting to milk summer for all it’s worth, but all you get is a good glimpse at the rotten soul of the universe as it exists in and outside of yuppie jazz discos?” The weather was often unforgiving—“everyone is feeling the deep funk of winter’s bitch turn”—but the city was not: “It is profoundly comforting to live in a city that doesn’t give a shit and loves you how you are, because it is every bit as marred, bereft, and cocky as you are.”
The nonsequential entries make it difficult to chart Hopper’s growth, but that isn’t her game. In this lively and funny collection, she bears vivid witness to an industrial punk landscape that is both crumbling and evolving beneath her bare feet.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1788-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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