An affectionate and often incisive appraisal of the author's thoroughly peculiar yet thoroughly representative suburban Connecticut adolescence. Novelist Salzman's previous memoir, the well-received Iron and Silk (1987), told of his experiences during a two-year stint as an English teacher in China. He begins here by narrating drolly the quintessentially American way his interest in China started: At 13 he saw a kung fu movie and suddenly developed a conviction that he would become a Zen monk. He built a shrine around some chopsticks and incense, purchased a Surprise Bald Head Wig in lieu of cutting off his hair, and soon began taking kung fu lessons, in which he persisted. Salzman recalls his conflicted allegiances to several role models: his terrifying, drunken, somehow inspiring kung fu master, Sensei O'Keefe; his fellow kung fu student Michael, whose fatherless home full of delinquent brothers was the opposite of Salzman's own orderly household; and especially his father, who managed to refrain from expressing disapproval even in the face of his son's undigested Zen babble. A high school teacher persuaded Salzman to study Chinese language and culture seriously, and he wound up learning traditional landscape painting from a waiter at the local Chinese restaurant. Salzman's gentle mockery of adolescent foibles is so dead-on that he achieves Waugh-like moments of hilarity. But in the second half both the humor and the insights trail off a little: After a particularly psychotic demonstration by Sensei O'Keefe, Salzman quit kung fu, which ended his friendship with Michael. He graduated from high school a year early, smoked a lot of pot, and played jazz cello in the basement. Then he went to Yale, had bouts of fairly ordinary existential malaise, and emerged wiser. Salzman engagingly describes teen malleability and confusion; hopefully he'll immortalize his childhood next.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43945-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
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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