A peripatetic but never pedestrian memoir.
The prolific crime novelist (Hit and Run, 2008, etc.) writes about his adventures as a racewalker.
The author’s focus at first seems puzzling. Block chooses not to tell the story of his writing life—a project he began but abandoned after weeks of feverish writing—or his personal life (“if you wanted to know something about me, well, too bad”). Instead, the memoir focuses almost entirely on his distance walking. Generally these walks are competitive—marathons and 24-hour walks in which the globetrotting Block consistently ignores both the scenery (he leaves his glasses at home) and the other runners and concentrates on beating his shortest time and longest distance. When he’s not entering formal events—from which he took a hiatus for more than 20 years—he and his wife are driving across America in search of all the towns named Buffalo or traversing Spain on foot. Block occasionally goes off on amusing tangents. He writes briefly on the question of why even nonobservant Jews like himself don’t eat pork, the nature of his interfaith (make that interagnostic) marriage and his preference for trees over Porta-Potties. On the whole, though, this is an account of the author’s entering event after event, wondering why he keeps walking despite blisters and backaches. It’s telling that the only two books whose gestation he describes in any detail are his novel Random Walk (1988) and the present volume. Fans of Block’s fiction may be interested, but they should be prepared to skim the particulars of times and distances that the author assiduously records.
A peripatetic but never pedestrian memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-172181-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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