“I can’t believe it all just stops.” Barton died in September 2002, leaving behind this appreciable scrapbook of his life.
Dying from stomach cancer at 51, the late media entrepreneur Barton looked back over his hungry, high-speed life to tender some personal truths.
There is a powerful disconnect in these pages between the studied calm of Barton’s closing months and his earlier life as an admittedly outsized alpha male, a striver and overachiever. “I’m just trying to give a candid report on what I’ve experienced and continue to experience, to map the progress toward my own little death. I don’t pretend it’s been tidy,” he says, and yet it is a fairly tidy summation. (Though Shames [The Naked Detective, 2000, etc.] must have helped Barton compose his thoughts, his presence is invisible except for short, eliding chapters. He takes no credit except to place his name first in the author order.) Barton’s final job was with Liberty Media, a company that shaped the cable television landscape. He grew into a rich man, but before all the money there was a life that fit snuggly into the zeitgeist of the ’60s: ski bum, card dealer, musician, political forays, and also being son to a father who died young, alerting Barton to his own potentially short lifespan. A prickly adolescent, he learned to manage the energy, letting it “ripen into what I think of as creative irreverence.” He pushed himself, and, in doing so, learned a few lessons that he wished to pass along, especially to his children: “Recognizing the difference between a dumb risk and a smart one; understanding when you need a change of direction, and having the guts to do it.” Certainly his insights are subjective, not a few quite filmy, though others ring with common sense. As Shames remarks, “The overriding theme was always the idea of becoming ready. Ready to live; ready to die.”
“I can’t believe it all just stops.” Barton died in September 2002, leaving behind this appreciable scrapbook of his life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57954-688-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
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
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