FAMOUS BUILDER

Name: FAMOUS BUILDER
Author: Paul Lisicky
ISBN: 1-55597-369-8

by Paul Lisicky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002

Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple...

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In an offbeat memoir, Lisicky (Lawnboy, not reviewed) takes dense, obsessed bites from his past and deposits them at the feet of his readers for them to marvel over how he got from there to here.

While growing up in southern New Jersey during the 1960s, in a world of sprawling housing developments, Lisicky wants to be a great builder, like Bill Levitt: “I want those who drive through my communities to be socked in the head with the sheer beauty of all they see.” (Later, when he meets Levitt—or is this just a piece of creative nonfiction?—he says to the mogul, “You gave style to the masses,” and the builder responds: “The masses are asses.”) He’s aware of the stress under Levitt’s veneer, but Lisicky hopes to imbue his work with elegance and understated good taste. He: “All developers do is rip people off. I’m going to be a musician and a composer.” And he does, changing over from construction to liturgical composition, not that the housing developments haven’t left their mark. Through his teens and early 20s, he writes church music—his work is even published—and he discovers a gay sexuality. The sexuality survives, but not the future in music: it had felt right when the church was as much about hope as fear; but now, in its conservative Dark Ages, he asks how he could “ignore charges of colluding with the enemy” should he return to liturgical composition. There are riffs on neighbors, clothing, and college, each snapping the reader to attention after having been lost in one of Lisicky’s long, atmospheric tableaux of family—where the warmth of the reflections and steady pulse of humor suggest Lisicky wasn’t an unhappy boy, nor an unobservant one.

Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple and illuminate.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002

ISBN: 1-55597-369-8

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LATER
by Paul Lisicky

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NARROW DOOR
by Paul Lisicky

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.