A slightly better blend of Scoop and Dispatches than many memoirs by foreign correspondents. While in graduate school, and drawn by the idea of travel and adventure, Cockburn (Dangerous Liaison, 1991, etc.), now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, joined the international bureau of NBC News. Still in her early 20s, it wasn't long before she was up to her neck in wars and disasters. Television news, especially international reporting, was still a macho fraternity, and Cockburn found herself in the uncomfortable but inspiriting role of pioneer. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, from Somalia to the Gulf War, usually behind the camera in the essential but undervalued role of producer, she has covered some of the last two decades' hottest spots. Along the way, she won a shelfful of prestigious awards and found time to have three children without most of the compromises faced by working women. For example, six months pregnant, she descended into the maelstrom of Somalia, her expanded stomach covered by an extra-large bullet-proof vest (until she discovered that Somali gunmen made a sport of testing the vests by deliberately shooting at their wearers). Cockburn never stayed very long in one place, jumping from story to story, six weeks here, a month there, just enough time to dig up a few scoops, work a new angle on an old story, and set up interviews and camera angles for the dancing-bear correspondent from New York who'd fly in for a few days to front her hard work. Because she's never in one place long enough to appreciate its true intricacies and shadings, much of her reportage here feels like intelligent tourism. She also has an off-putting flair for self-dramatization, making the moments of real danger seem oddly flat. Though the book is well crafted and full of incident, very little of it lingers long in memory. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48319-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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