Reader-friendly memoir by an author equally at home on the page and on the stage.
With ambivalent Irish-American panache, a politically oriented rock musician recounts his life in County Wexford and New York City.
Kirwan (the novel Liverpool Fantasy, 2003) is a songwriter-singer in the band Black 47. While growing up in Catholic and predictable Wexford during the 1950s, he enjoyed the security of the familiar and was a devoted member of his family, whom he writes about here—his parents, and especially his grandfather—in phrases alternately rollicking and sentimental. Describing his youth, he relies on vivid, memorable language and frequently irreverent images, as he does throughout (“Wexford, in those days, would have left Calcutta breathless in its devotion and adherence to an ironclad caste system. The only comfort was that everyone had someone else to look down on”). Despite his contentedness, restlessness overtook Kirwan, and he moved as a young adult to New York City to seek new experience, including work as a professional musician. Like memoirists before him, he describes the brotherhood among and the conflicts between native-born Irish on the one hand and Irish-Americans on the other, who never lived in the homeland. Frank and Malachy McCourt are among such figures, and Kirwan works them and hundreds of other memorable folks—known to him personally or by reputation only—into his text. Some get their own chapters, with the late rock-music critic Lester Bangs receiving especially full treatment. Bangs didn’t understand the performing part of music—“I might as well have been talking to Billy Carter about the influence of serialism on Philip Glass”—but the critic knew on a gut level what he liked and who would succeed, including Black 47. The band caught on in clubs throughout the Bronx, and Kirwan moves past stereotype in describing the richness of that oft-maligned borough. His obligatory account of living in Manhattan during 9/11 slows the lively narrative but can’t kill it.
Reader-friendly memoir by an author equally at home on the page and on the stage.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-644-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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