Rogak successfully captures and relays interesting tales, but Silverstein’s soul and passion are pieces that remain missing.
Unauthorized biography offers revealing anecdotes, complete with some dirty laundry, about the prolific children’s author and cartoonist.
Rogak (The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown, 2005, etc.) continues to mine for secondhand vignettes about someone in the public forum, dishing up speculation about Silverstein’s childhood (“today, he might be diagnosed as dyslexic”) and gossip regarding his sexual proclivities (“he preferred these young corn-fed shiksas from the Midwest, the younger the better”). Although Silverstein (1930–99) is most famous for poems and illustrations in books like The Giving Tree, The Missing Piece and Where the Sidewalk Ends, he began his drawing career at Playboy in the 1950s and was a mainstay at the mansion for decades. Dozens of reports from old friends and colleagues describe his personality as larger than life, replete with an off-color wit and penchant for inside jokes, on display in the numerous album notes he wrote for musician pals. These stories about Silverstein provide insights into some of his otherwise inexplicable behavior, such as the car accident in 1959 that permanently scared him away from getting behind the wheel again. In addition to sketches, he also wrote folk songs such as “Boy Named Sue,” made famous by Johnny Cash, and avant-garde scripts for film and theater. It’s fascinating to read about his collaborations with the likes of playwright David Mamet and country singer Bobby Bare, though it’s also clear that closeness to Silverstein required giving him plenty of room. By all accounts a loyal friend, he was at his most generous when nothing was expected of him. With women in particular, he apparently had no interest in being pursued.
Rogak successfully captures and relays interesting tales, but Silverstein’s soul and passion are pieces that remain missing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-35359-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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