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TO THE NEW OWNERS

A MEMOIR OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD

If not quite as funny as billed, there remains much gentle humor and a certain elegiac sweetness that more than...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha's Vineyard in this unfailingly charming reminiscence of summers spent on the island.

Blais (Journalism/Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst; Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family, 2001, etc.) chronicles the final days and robust history of a prominent family's time at their vacation home. The author makes clear she was not born into wealth, nor did she feel that marriage to John Katzenbach, son of former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, afforded her any special entitlements, on the Vineyard or anywhere else. Much more than an account of the privileged class enjoying its privileges, this story of the “shack” at Thumb Point is an engaging tale of a place that, for family or visiting friends, meant a leisurely but active lifestyle raised to an art form. “After a few days by the pond,” she writes, “you became a happy animal, scampering barefoot, feral, and fortified.” A great strength of the book are the author’s portraits of her mother-in-law, the formidable Lydia, writer Phil Caputo, and publisher Katharine Graham, the latter sketch sounding a dirge on the decline of newspapers. Other principal players, including her husband, father-in-law, and year-round islanders, provide additional anecdotes. Readers will forgive the name-dropping because it is largely unavoidable; it serves as a gateway to a more complete picture of Vineyard culture, how seemingly fancy folk enjoy relatively modest lives in decidedly rustic surroundings. The book has the flavor of a finely observed travel book, with Blais offering a brief history of the island and a thorough inventory of its hierarchy, traditions, and manifest (sometimes eccentric) pleasures. In her hands, it is an endearingly quaint community, though not without a tinge of snob appeal, which she gamely dissects.

If not quite as funny as billed, there remains much gentle humor and a certain elegiac sweetness that more than compensates—that, and a touching coda.

Pub Date: July 4, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2657-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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