Sweet but ultimately vapid days spent with novelist Coomer (Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God, 1995, etc.) aboard his wooden motorsailer. Coomer and his wife and children summer in Eliot, Maine, hard by the Piscataqua River estuary. Why not, he figured, buy a boat? Perusing the boating magazines, he found a nifty old wooden vessel for sale, ``twenty-eight feet from plumb bow to plumb transom,'' broad and comfy and with a door for the loo. The boat was christened Yonder, a nod to Coomer's proclaimed (though unsubstantiated) wanderlust, and what follow are recountings of little nautical ventures poking about the Maine coast, its islands and rivers and shoreside curiosities. It is all very lighthearted: On his maiden cruise, Coomer screws up and humiliatingly has to be rescued after his engine fails; he and cronies boat and kill a bluefish in a flawed, mock-heroic event. He interminably dissects the hours spent aboard with his extended family; pays an unhappy visit to Yonder's original boatyard; catalogs the small pleasures of boat life, like when he would ``wake up every morning, wipe the dew from the helm and the instruments, have the engine start on the first crank, and set off into an accepting sea.'' Gradually, a note of boastful self-regard slips into the otherwise amiable narrative. At one point Coomer observes that ``one of my novels sold to a big producer in Hollywood,'' and when his wife suggests that the purchase of Yonder might run ``a lot of money,'' Coomer shoots back, ``Heather, we make a lot of money.'' So light, it melts into air, but the episodes of chest- thumping leave a raw, unwanted patch. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15646-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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