A snappy, well-researched account of a trailblazing woman.
Biederman’s (Sismo, 1993, etc.) biography tells the story of an eccentric restaurateur.
From the 1930s to the ’60s, Patricia Murphy started several profitable restaurants in greater New York and Florida. She was, by Biederman’s account, a character; she was exacting, telling her staff to “Avoid flurried manner, even when you must work fast,” and superstitious, often crossing herself in public despite not being religious. She was also given to tall tales; she owned a plane that she falsely claimed to pilot herself. But her unparalleled business sense—evidenced in such moves as opening a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale just before it became a retirement destination—didn’t always guarantee her happiness, and Biederman illuminates her highs and lows with humor and compassion. In her earlier years, Murphy struggled to get by in New York City as a musician before investing her last few dollars in a failing Brooklyn restaurant around the start of the Great Depression. Following her initial success, she’d prove to be an expert at branding, and she advanced in the restaurant business and high society through sheer determination. Biederman’s meticulous research provides intimate details of her subject’s life, noting, for instance, that Murphy, before her success, would “pass up dinner to splurge on a twenty-five-cent bunch of daffodils.” These illustrative flourishes create a vivid narrative, anchored by interviews with Murphy’s friends, family members, and colleagues as well as letters, restaurant documents, and other primary source material. Along the way, the author offers insights into the racial dynamics of Brooklyn’s past restaurant scene, the era’s changing gender politics, and the class tensions that followed Murphy’s rise. Of particular interest is the lifelong feud that she had with her siblings, who broke away from her patronage early on to run a competing restaurant chain. Biederman follows Murphy’s life to its end in 1979,noting how time and circumstance worked together to undermine her empire.
A snappy, well-researched account of a trailblazing woman.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4384-7154-9
Page Count: 268
Publisher: State Univ. of New York Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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