An uneven but rewarding autobiography that records not only how this artist has lived, but, at its best, how he sees. The octogenarian Lionni has been an artist, graphic designer, and children's book author. His upbringing in several countries—Holland, Belgium, the US, and Italy—left him fluent in several languages but with "no mother tongue." The result is a book that often feels translated—like Nabokov without the verbal genius. The detailed record of his European youth is sometimes moving but frequently overinflated, as when he exclaims, "Great excitement in early fall when Father became a full-fledged certified public accountant!" However, the narrative is consistently strong whenever it connects to Lionni's true calling, the visual arts. He shows how artists see differently from other people—for example, in being able to remember "the specks of mica flickering in the sand, the fold of lichens on a stone." He speaks with insight and affection about 20th-century painting (raised among avid art collectors, he became familiar as a child with the revolutionary work of Chagall, Klee, Kandinsky, and Mondrian). Above all, in recounting his journey from bohemian in Mussolini's Italy to upwardly mobile American art director to his rediscovery of his artistic roots via painting and children's books, he lays bare the moral choices an artist confronts. Turning down a lucrative job offer that would have locked him into an advertising career, he writes, "I had defended myself from the threat of a predictable future." The end result is a feeling of triumph that he successfully ventured into so many fields—painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and criticism. Though Lionni's prose is not as accomplished as his visual work, his autobiography inspires admiration that the artist has tried—and largely succeeded—in yet another form.
Pub Date: April 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42393-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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