An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.
A revealing publication from the celebrated prose stylist.
In 1970, Didion (Blue Nights, 2011, etc.) took a sojourn in the Deep South, beginning in New Orleans and then heading to Mississippi and Alabama before returning to the Big Easy. (Also included are some pages about the author’s California homes in her youth.) Didion had intended to write a book about the South, but she just never got around to it. However, she retained her notes and observations, which compose this slender volume. Here are many of the splendid, sharp-eyed sentences for which she has long been admired. There are also brief notes, snippets of overheard conversations (in restaurants, on the street, in motels, libraries, around motel swimming pools), and sights along the road, viewed from her rental car. Didion writes about snakes, heat, sports, racial issues, and a strange coolness she experienced from many of the locals. In Oxford, she mentions that she could not find William Faulkner’s grave, which is hard to miss these days. She also bemoans the lack of bookstores in town, hardly a problem now. But what will strike readers is—as Didion declares—her inability to “get into it”—to interview the people she ought to (some avoided her) and to venture more deeply into the Southern heart. She does chronicle her interviews with some locals and others, including a visit with Walker Percy (for which readers will certainly yearn for more details). Didion also confesses that she was ready—just about at any time—to hop on a plane for home. But some of her observations are classics: a man with a shotgun shooting pigeons on a street in a Mississippi town; a comment about the fierce heat: “all movement seemed liquid.”
An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3279-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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