Wry and heartfelt, Chabon’s riffs uncover brand-new insights in even the most quotidian subjects.
A charming collection of autobiographical essays—on childhood, parenthood and lifelong geekhood—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist.
In modern classics like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon (Gentlemen of the Road, 2007, etc.) gave genre writing literary heft, and he does much the same here. His material is the stuff of folksy, small-town newspaper columns, but he applies an unusual level of wit and candor to the form. In his essay on Legos, he drills deep into the tactile pleasures they provided him as a child and the frustrations that their current complex, imagination-killing designs give him as a parent. Writing about cooking, he patiently runs through the details of the first crumb cake he successfully baked as a nine-year-old. “A Woman of Valor” looks at Big Barda, a little-loved comic-book superheroine. It’s a sharp essay on the definition of sincerely powerful women and why they rarely appear in pop culture. Chabon’s tone is nostalgic, funny and self-deprecating, though the memories are often bittersweet: the strange, brief fling he had with a friend of his mother’s when he was 15, bad experiences with women his own age, a botched first marriage, a drug-addicted acquaintance slipping away from his efforts to help. Chabon discusses life as a writer only glancingly. He briefly notes, for instance, his struggle to create an authentic female character in Kavalier & Clay—eventually gutting 400 pages of effort—within the context of misogyny in pop culture, and mentions David Foster Wallace’s suicide only as a launchpad for an essay on his wife’s bout with depression. Even his defense of MFAs says more about the emotional maturity he received pursuing the degree than anything about craft. Only once, in a forced bit of punditry about Jose Canseco and steroids, is he off his game. He’d much rather discuss sharing Doctor Who with his kids, and he’s clearly having so much fun being a dad—and thinking about what it means to be a dad—that it’s a wonder he has time to create such excellent novels.
Wry and heartfelt, Chabon’s riffs uncover brand-new insights in even the most quotidian subjects.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-149018-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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