Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.
Ten autobiographical essays that read more like journal entries, by the King of Grit Lit (Fay, 2000, etc.), disappointingly not up to the level of Brown’s last nonfiction collection, On Fire (1994).
The title piece, originally released in 1997 as a 40-page art edition, is the collection’s high-water mark, a richly told story about Brown’s son’s hopes of becoming a cattle-farmer in spite of a never-ending string of bad luck. (The instance detailed here involves birthing two stillborn calves.) “By the Pond,” which describes taking eight acres from which Brown fished as a young boy, fixing them up, and putting a dock in the water, is also noteworthy. “Thicker Than Blood,” short but effective, returns to Brown’s frequent subject, hunting, to tell how the older men in his small-town community initiated him into the world of hunting and its “reserves of good memories,” filling in for the father who died when he was 16 (and who didn’t hunt anyway). Brown struggles but nearly gets it right with a couple of others: “Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend,” an account of his life as a writer and Crews’s huge influence on him, and “So Much Fish, So Close to Home: an Improv,” a highly original but unfocused and awkward tale in need of editing. “Chattanooga Nights,” touching for its aw-shucks description of Brown’s first invitation to a literature conference, feels redundant after “Harry Crews” and comes embarrassingly close to self-canonization with its invocation of Eudora Welty, William Styron, Ernest Gaines, and the like. Of the collection’s final three essays, two (“Goat Songs” and “Shack”) are fine but not noteworthy, and the other (“The Whore in Me”) is uninspired.
Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.Pub Date: April 13, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-167-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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