A lot of information crammed into a few pages, but the modest thesis rings true.
Novelist and popular historian Standiford (Washington Burning: How a Frenchman’s Vision of Our Nation’s Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army, 2008, etc.) revisits the genesis of the great English writer’s most enduring book.
Also scattered through the text are stories about how December 25 became Christmas; how fir trees, greeting cards, turkeys and Santa got involved; and how Christmas transformed from a minor holiday, secondary on the Christian calendar to Easter, into the multimonth mega-holiday/shopping spree it has become. Charles Dickens (1812–70), Standiford asserts, set a-rolling down history’s hill the giant Christmas snowball we now enjoy—or endure or deplore. The author easily, graciously and repeatedly acknowledges his debt to the heavy lifting of other scholars, principally biographer Peter Ackroyd (Dickens, 1990) and indefatigable literary historian Michael Patrick Hearn (The Annotated Christmas Carol, 2003). In many instances, Standiford is summarizing, musing and generalizing, but effectively so. One major narrative thread is Dickens’s troubled childhood, which occasioned some of the greatest fiction in the English language. At the time he created A Christmas Carol (1843), however, the author’s career was slipping. Martin Chuzzlewit, still in serial, was not faring well and he was in debt and additionally burdened by supporting his improvident father. He wrote his Christmas fable in six swift weeks, and the first printing of 6,000 copies sold out in days, though the expenses of publication negated much of the author’s initial profit. Career revived, Dickens wrote four more Christmas books, all popular and all swiftly summarized here. A Christmas Carol would prove astonishingly durable, transforming into plays, films, cartoons, radio and TV shows, and an irascible Disney drake named McDuck. The author rightly focuses on the secular humanism and benevolence Dickens espoused.
A lot of information crammed into a few pages, but the modest thesis rings true.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40578-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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