Seldom deep, McMurtry’s driver’s-seat ruminations are unlikely to win him new fans, but his prose unwinds in a deceptively...
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist McMurtry (Duane’s Depressed, 1998, etc.) takes a rambling bookman’s holiday on America’s great interstates, hoping to “reread some of these roads as I might a book.”
Surprisingly for someone whose work brims with colorful characters that almost burst through the confines of the printed page, McMurtry is uninterested in meeting and depicting people in the areas through which he travels. Instead, he tries to “treat the great roads as rivers, floating down this one, struggling up that one, writing about these riverboats as I find them, and now and then, perhaps, venturing a comment about the land beside the road.” Landscapes, natural or manmade, elicit some of his sharpest descriptions. Although he scorns Missouri and the hot, woebegone town of Why, Arizona, his prose vibrates with rhapsodic intensity when explaining why the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is so stunning, or how the light in Tucson flows over the mountains like “a river of bright air.” An antiquarian book dealer for almost as long as he’s been a published novelist, McMurtry sprinkles comments on numerous authors along the way, ranging from the overrated (Hemingway) to the now-neglected (e.g., Hamlin Garland, William Allen White, Janet Lewis). Neither his eye nor his memory misses many of the ironies in modern life—such as Hollywood’s new breed of 20-something studio executives, or barefooted rock star John Mellencamp driving him from the Indianapolis Airport in his new Jaguar. Most movingly, places evoke in McMurtry melancholy recollections of loss (such as the world of slow dirt roads in which he grew up in Texas) and even (in Hagerstown, Maryland) the realization, following heart surgery, that “a part of me—perhaps most of me—seemed to have died, been lost, vanished, slipped away.”
Seldom deep, McMurtry’s driver’s-seat ruminations are unlikely to win him new fans, but his prose unwinds in a deceptively simple, winning manner.Pub Date: July 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86884-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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