Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.
Stretching credulity to the snapping point, Rips searches for (and finds) a mysterious black woman who appears in some drawings executed by the author’s father and discovered only after his death.
Employing images that Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor might well have declined to use in their fiction (too outrageous), Rips (Pasquale’s Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town, 2001) regales us with the antics of his fun-house family out in the Central Plains. Samples: a neighbor named Ronald has sex with a chicken that subsequently appears on the dinner menu. The author’s grandparents operated a brothel. The author as a little boy climbs into bed with his dead nanny. At the circus, Rips and his father see a performer fall to her death. A childhood friend named David has sex with his mother and then years later—mad—removes his own face. An employee in his father’s eyeglass factory affixes an artificial penis to his cowboy boot and is thereby popular with the women. A man, digging graves in the crater of a volcano, survives an eruption, losing only his jaw in the process. A many-days-dead body falls through the ceiling of a coffee shop where the author is sitting. A tornado sucks his grandmother through a basement garbage chute up into the kitchen. It seems currently fashionable in memoir to smudge the ever-vague line between fact and fiction (if you haven’t experienced some bestiality or boozy child-abuse, what chance do you have for publication?), but Rips’s adventures will cause readers to wonder whether there is any difference. Rips continually tries to spread a layer of respectability and even erudition on his narrative cracker, so we’re invited to wonder what Sartre might have thought of all of this, and there are earnest allusions to Ajax, Ionesco, and Herodotus.
Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-27352-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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