Honest and entertaining, this book forces readers to confront the systems of inequality in which we are all implicated.
One privileged LA couple tastes the labyrinthine magnitude of the city’s homelessness epidemic when they invite one of those chronically affected to live in their backyard guest cottage.
Konik (Report From the Street: Voices of the Homeless, 2018, etc.), an ex–professional gambler, and his wife, jazz singer Charmaine Clamor, have tired of their lives of material success. They have reoriented themselves away from the pursuit of fame and fortune to that of healing, creativity, and community building. “Maybe the better angels of our nature aren’t as distant and inaccessible as most of us imagine,” muses Konik. “Maybe all that’s required to access and embrace these angels is to decide consciously and willfully that we’ve got everything we’ll ever need, with plenty of extra to share.” When Fisher King Mike, a local man who suffers from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and chronic homelessness, comes to them for help, they trepidatiously begin a process of trust-building that starts with Mike’s bags camping out behind their hedge. Two years later, he’s become part of the family. To the book’s credit, all parties behave in a deeply human manner. Mike proves himself to be an excellent handyman but struggles with reliability and his cadre of inner demons. Konik and his wife waffle between their generosity and their distrust, their resistance to having their space and routine disturbed and their concerns about Mike’s hygiene. Though Konik’s dialogue can be wooden as he translates his narration from the stage to the page (he’s currently a comedian as well as a writer), and lapses into self-promotion or melodrama sometimes distract the reader from the bigger issues at stake, Konik has an amusing storytelling style that keeps the pages turning.
Honest and entertaining, this book forces readers to confront the systems of inequality in which we are all implicated.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63576-729-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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