An affectionate, incomplete recollection of life’s rich pageant.
The unpredictably serene memoir from one of the most daring voices in fiction.
Ballard (Kingdom Come, 2012, etc.), who died in 2009, was not just a revolutionary. He also demonstrated his extraordinary talent with a narrative range that ran from autobiographical fiction to the psychosexual antics of Crash. His 1969 collection The Atrocity Exhibition was so controversial, in fact, that Doubleday pulped the entire first print run. This autobiography, first published in the United Kingdom four years ago, was widely expected to be a revelation. Many were surprised to find that the book is instead a warm, nostalgic and kind remembrance, if lackluster in portraying the richness of the author’s work. For fans of Empire of the Sun, the first half of the book portrays Ballard’s experiences in the Lunghua internment camp near Shanghai during World War II and sheds light on his relationship with his parents. He also describes the tragic death of his wife, just after he started to establish himself as a writer, and to a lesser degree his unconventional relationship with lifelong partner Claire Walsh. Ballard reserves much of his affection for his children, for whom the memoir is named and who inspire unexpected humor. “Some fathers make good mothers,” he writes, “and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other—in short, the kind of mother, no doubt loving and easy-going, of who the social services deeply disapprove.” The author pays surprisingly little attention to the work itself. He gives cursory mention to the firestorm that surrounded The Atrocity Exhibition, while he frames other novels in indistinct memories of their Hollywood adaptations.
An affectionate, incomplete recollection of life’s rich pageant.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-420-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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