“In backpacks across America, Algren still lives.”
Since it’s been 25 years since the only comprehensive biography of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), this discerning book is welcome.
Wisniewski, a longtime Chicago reporter, knows Algren’s home turf well. As a teenager, he was already “on the outside,” enamored with the South Side’s “neighborhood pool sharks, gamblers, bootleggers, and sandlot baseball stars.” Although a poor student in high school, he graduated from college in 1931 with a degree in journalism. Next came hitching and riding boxcars across Depression-era America, meeting the down and out and acquiring a taste for gambling that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Algren wasn’t a born writer, but with hard work and great effort, he became one. His good friend Kurt Vonnegut said he was “enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them.” The sale of an early story about robbery and murder to a magazine for $25 helped him secure a contract for his first novel. The New York Sun described his leftist, proletarian Somebody in Boots as a novel that “does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness.” The Works Progress Administration provided some much-needed income after his marriage in 1938, and he flirted with communism. Richard Wright helped him find a home for his next novel, Never Come Morning, which Hemingway called “good stuff.” Back home after a stint in the Army, Nelson started a lengthy, romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Wisniewski calls it “ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible…and amazing.” They inspired each other. Nelson’s The Man with the Golden Arm, about drug addiction, was a “hit,” and Otto Preminger’s popular film version came out in 1955 (for which Algren was paid little). A Walk on the Wild Side, which he felt was his best book, came out a year later. When the impoverished author died in 1981, all his work was out of print. It’s good to have the irascible, bohemian chronicler of the streets back via this top-notch biography.
“In backpacks across America, Algren still lives.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-532-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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