Uneven but frequently engrossing.
George (The Accidental Hunter, 2005, etc.) chronicles his progression from an impoverished childhood to an accomplished career as a music journalist, novelist and filmmaker, with many stops along the way.
The author was born into a working-class black family in swiftly changing Brooklyn. It was 1957: White families were moving out to the suburbs; African-American and Puerto Rican families were moving in. George’s father was absent for much of his youth, and his hardworking mother served as his principal role model. The memoir serves up many images already shopworn from other coming-of-age stories set in New York during the ’60s and ’70s: stickball in the street, dancing to soul records, trading comic books, etc. George’s recollections often seem romanticized, with one notable exception. His colorful descriptions of pop, soul and jazz, the experience of listening to music and his reactions to it, always seem authentic, and they point a clear path to his career as a journalist. He developed his craft at Billboard, New York Amsterdam News and The Village Voice (his dream job). As the author chronicles his professional success, the book’s focus shifts to his relationships with an impressive, if lengthy, list of major black artists, including Russell Simmons, Spike Lee and Chris Rock, each of whom gets his own chapter. While these accounts provide a unique perspective on the development of African-American culture, they also fragment the text into choppy, piecemeal sections that abandon the subject of George’s family life. He attempts to bring things full circle with concluding chapters on Life Support, a film he directed about his sister’s battle with HIV, and a brief account of a family reunion at his niece’s graduation.
Uneven but frequently engrossing.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02036-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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