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'I'VE SEEN THE BEST OF IT'

Name: 'I'VE SEEN THE BEST OF IT'
Author: Joseph W. Alsop
ISBN: 0-393-02917-4

A MEMOIR

by Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 1992

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Undertaken during his last two years, after being told he had lung cancer, Alsop's richly human, compelling pages were smoothed over and completed by colleague Platt. Alsop (1910-89) was a Washington journalist of great wit, knowledge, and humanity. Raised on his father's 700-acre farm on the Connecticut Gold Coast, he recalls elegiacally his schooling as an ``educated gentleman'' at Groton and Harvard and his youth among the Long Island North Shore's ``WASP Ascendancy,'' the fabulously rich who produced many of the nation's leaders, especially the two Roosevelt Presidents to whom Alsop was related. This tribe, with its high-flown diction and vast dress codes, also produced the ``Wise Men'' who helped guide FDR through the New Deal and WW II. As a fresh young reporter in the New York Herald Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau, Alsop found himself leading a double life as a working reporter with a Senate beat and as a nightly diner-out among the elite, with dinner every second month with cousin Eleanor and the President at the White House. He switched to writing a column in tandem with a second reporter and eventually with his brother Stewart. In Hong Kong during WW II, Alsop went to an opium den with The New Yorker's Emily Hahn (then pregnant), then joined Colonel Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group of ``Flying Tigers'' and later became a minor actor in the recall of General Joseph Stilwell. Alsop gives us firsthand views of George Kennan, Joseph McCarthy, Charles de Gaulle, Dean Acheson, Winston Churchill, and Robert Oppenheimer, among others. His friendship with JFK becomes exhilarating. But the Vietnam War collapses his gusto, and when he retires from journalism in 1974, it is because ``I could no longer understand what was happening in America, perhaps because I had finally become an old man, frozen in the viewpoints of the past.'' Top-flight—and then some. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: March 16, 1992

ISBN: 0-393-02917-4

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | 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.