These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have...
Fast-track editor Alexander downshifts to the back-road life of a Maine farmer, though he keeps his journalist’s pen busy.
As a young showbiz editor at Variety and People, he already possessed considerable personal insight: “I was apprenticing to be an asshole.” So Alexander and his family upped and moved north to Maine and a farm that had seen better times. Short descriptions of his days, originally published in the Portland Phoenix, range over subjects from burning the blueberry patch to contra dancing. The author is the proverbial rube in the land of hardscrabble survivors, picking up scraps of wisdom, though he feels he will never be accepted. Yet, between magazine assignments (which come in an enviable horn of plenty), Alexander works hard at connecting with his new home; he might forget to engage the mower blades when cutting—or, rather, not cutting—the lawn, but he will also plant and sow, fight the good fight against a strip-mine proposal, and even run for selectman, an act of considerable jeopardy to his ego. At times he can be sanctimonious (“Farmers also go to college these days. The nation’s agricultural schools, supported heavily by agribusiness, teach them how to be profitable [but] there’s no textbook on how to hose out the sheep shed without disturbing the robin’s nest”), but he can also admit his inadequacies. The citizenry keep him up to speed, whether it’s the “septic analyst” who advises a new system after he “noticed some black gunk oozing up from the ground. It was crude but definitely not oil,” or the neighbor who counsels him to simply accept his primitive wood-and-gas stove. “My mother had one of those stoves,” says Ken. “Sure, every now and then she’d blow the doors off the house, but who gives a shit?”
These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have an enduring simplicity and allure.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1412-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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