Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.
Journalist and novelist Mewshaw (Shelter from the Storm, Mar. 2003, etc.) recalls his days as a fledgling in the tree of literature and examines the myriad influences of big birds named Garrett, Styron, Jones, Bowles, and Vidal.
There are some dazzling moments in this uneven memoir: James Jones’s catty comment about Hemingway’s oral sex with his shotgun is worth the cover price all by itself; and the long final chapter about Gore Vidal, with asides featuring Pat Conroy and Norman Mailer, coruscates with its subject’s wit. (Vidal once quipped, claims Mewshaw, that the three saddest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.”) The author can gore literary bulls, too. Accompanied by a tall model in an Italian restaurant, for example, Mailer “looked like a tiny tot in a Halloween costume.” But Mewshaw is drawn to celebrities like a fly to cream pie. He begins by describing how he convinced George Garrett to let him into a writing seminar at the University of Virginia, then segues into accounts of drinking with William Styron, dining with Harold Robbins and Robert Penn Warren and Anthony Burgess and Paul Bowles and Graham Greene (not at the same time). He chatted with Sharon Stone, saw Lindsay Wagner naked, and had a surreal shopping spree with Estelle Parsons in the desert. Mewshaw shows the sense to be self-deprecating at times; he publishes a strong letter from Graham Greene complaining about his published profile of the English writer, and he occasionally admits to various personal and professional failures. But he also seems more than determined to portray himself as an unjustly overlooked novelist, quoting—sometimes at length—flattering comments from Styron, Warren, and Burgess. Errors and careless prose undercut his claims. He attributes to Chairman Mao a quotation from Lao Tzu, misspells Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name several times, and too frequently finds language that is conventional rather than novel.
Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8071-2852-X
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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