All in all, earnestly winning, old-fashioned storytelling.
A slapdash, repetitious but nonetheless compelling look at two phenoms of the late-19th-century, by Mr. Wild West himself.
McMurtry (Loop Group, 2004, etc.) knows his territory, and though he takes some time here working up a thesis separating Buffalo Bill Cody’s and Annie Oakley’s legends from the facts, the author of the Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove is ever fascinating and knowledgeable. He does not purport to give a biography of Cody, who grew up in “bleeding” Kansas and worked briefly as a Pony Express guide, Army scout and buffalo hunter before embarking on a 30-year show-biz career that ended with his death in 1917. But the facts of Cody’s romantic story keep pulling him in, especially the “tropes,” as McMurtry calls the legendary set pieces by which Cody defined himself. These included his first killing of an Indian when he was 11 and his scalping of Yellow Hair in 1876. Cody’s scouting for the Army allows McMurtry free reign on the subtleties of the Indian Wars, a subject he evidently relishes. Having distinguished the facts of Cody’s glamorous life (fodder for something like 1,700 dime novels), McMurtry moves into his work as a showman. By 1882, Cody had organized some of the first rodeos and hired Indians to help stage such dramatic mock-historical scenes as the attack on the Deadwood stage and battles between settlers and Indians. One of his most successful acts was sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a poor girl from Ohio who made an honorable living by her gun and was the first woman to be admitted to British shooting clubs. McMurtry explores Oakley’s own “creation myth,” involving the shooting of a squirrel on a fence with her father’s too-big rifle when she was a girl: “She always claimed that it was one of the better shots she ever made.” No spectacular or sexy revelations here, just a curious excursus into Cody’s successful performance for “Grandmother England” during the troupe’s 1887 tour for Victoria’s Jubilee.
All in all, earnestly winning, old-fashioned storytelling.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7171-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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