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SHOUTING IN THE DARK

Name: SHOUTING IN THE DARK
Author: John Bramblitt
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8007-5

MY JOURNEY BACK TO THE LIGHT

by John Bramblitt & Lindsey Tate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2012

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With the assistance of children’s author Tate (Kate Larkin, the Bone Expert, 2008, etc.), blind artist Bramblitt chronicles his childhood and his art without resorting to pathos or sentimentality.

From an early age, the author accepted the two halves of his life, sick and well, and integrated the two. In his memoir, he offers no complaints of the poor medical care he received from age 4 in his Texas hometown. He suffered from undiagnosed congenital kidney disease for three years, then months of Lyme disease, again undiagnosed, and eventually the epilepsy that would lead to total blindness. He was lucky, however, in that he always had friends by his side. They may not have always understood his difficulties, but they supported him. The author’s determination to complete school and teach, in spite of missed classes and incompletes, illustrates the remarkable tenacity with which he has attacked life. Early on, Bramblitt drew from memory—“all my favorite drawings were stored in my brain in all their intricate detail.” Surely this ability is what led him to find and develop haptic visualization, a way of seeing the small parts of an object in order to make them a whole. The sense of touch is a large part of the nature of that perception, and Bramblitt’s work is a good example of an artist who proves Picasso’s comment that a painter “paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” An artist’s story about more than just his talent and his techniques.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-7627-8007-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Lyons Press

Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.