A mostly credulous look at the famous Israeli who claims to be able to bend spoons with his mind. Margolis (Cleese Enconters, 1992) first met and befriended Uri Geller in 1996. Margolis decided that he would do a biography of the mentalist, with his cooperation but examining all viewpoints. The result reads somthing like an E! Television documentary: friends and schoolmates (including “where are they now” information) recollect Geller’s childhood. These accounts are presented to refute the claim by his opponents that Geller created his show in his early 20s. The picture these accounts paint is that of a colorful and turbulent childhood, spent first in Tel Aviv, then Cyprus, and back to Israel for military service. It is in Tel Aviv as a child that Geller reports his first experience with the unknown. This takes the form of an encounter with “a ball of light” in a city garden. A short time after this, the spoons start bending. Geller’s family moves to Cyprus when he is 11; there he is remembered for playing mischief by moving the hands of the clocks in the classrooms and always being able to make the difficult shots in basketball. This, Geller contends, is due to his psychokinetic abilities. During his military service, machine gun parts are mysteriously transported from one location to another (and back again), ostensibly via the same method. The author also credits Geller with numerous happenings during the writing of the book, including clocks that fall off the wall in strange ways, laptops that stop working, and, of course, distorted cutlery. There are even parties where anyone can learn how to bend spoons with their mind, with a little help from their hands. An obviously wowed author presents a mostly sympathetic view of the life and times of Uri Geller. (16 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56649-025-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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