Colorful but slight.
An attorney makes his literary debut with a slim collection of musings on a year’s residence in Italy.
The format will be familiar to anyone having even a passing acquaintance with Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. An American family—in this case, ex-trial lawyer Michael, wife Sheila, and their baby daughter—moves to a European village and has an intriguing time learning about life from the quirky but warm inhabitants. Preciousness is a pitfall of this genre, but the author gives good promise of avoiding it in his opening pages, where he declares that “The plan was that Sheila would spend her days painting, while I would sit and reflect on the fact that I’d not worked for years, had an infant daughter, and was unable to produce or even reflect on anything that I or anyone else would consider useful.” Unfortunately, from here Rips swings his gaze outward and relates a series of anecdotes about the inhabitants of the town of Sutri: a blind bootmaker, a crusty bean farmer, a hermaphroditic shopkeeper. The locals seem to be little more than collections of traits; their motivations and relationships remain opaque. More promising is the author’s own story: an adulthood spent living in hotels, his relationships with his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, he does little with these topics, telling just enough to intrigue the reader and then retreating to yet another sketch of local qualities and customs. Rips makes motions towards a larger unifying theme, mentioning philosophy or the Bible or his curiosity about the meaning of life, but he never addresses these subjects in a sustained way. Taken as a whole, his effort falls flat.
Colorful but slight.Pub Date: May 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-74800-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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