A bare-bones narrative of a brash girl growing up in Los Angeles in the turbulent 1960s, determined to overcome her father's painful neglect. Novelist Ciment (The Law of Falling Bodies, 1993) looks back on her adolescence without pity and without judgment. She recounts years spent breaking into cars and houses, shoplifting, forging, and cutting school in a dry, deadpan tone that suits L.A.'s desert atmosphere. She, her mother, and her three brothers eke out a precarious living when her mother forces her emotionally and financially stingy father to leave. This bad girl who can barely spell has only one real interest—art. Despite a 30-year age difference, she becomes infatuated with Arnold, her married art teacher. (Curiously, Ciment never comments on the possibility that she may be searching for a father figure.) Seventeen in 1970, and desperate to escape L.A., Ciment scrapes up money to move to New York City. After posing nude at a sleazy ``modeling agency,'' she is overwhelmed by loneliness that sends her reeling back home, where she and Arnold consummate their affair and start living together. She gets into art school on the strength of her portfolio and a friend's willingness to take the SAT for her. Flash forward to 1986: Ciment (now a writer) and Arnold are living in New York when she receives a letter from her father—his first overture in years. The two guardedly reconcile, and she visits him in the hospital. When he dies soon after, she seems to grieve, not for him, but for what might have been, had he been a better father. This flawed but compelling memoir lacks a deeper level of introspection and a fuller sense of the Ciment family, but the author is a triumphantly self-made woman and her book gives us the agony—and intermittent joy—of the process in tough, spare, convincing language. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70171-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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