An engaging, original modern-day picaresque.
The quirky, intelligent memoir of an artist and fiction writer.
The left-handed brother of a right-handed fraternal twin and son of two Italians—a Sophia Loren look-alike mother who was “all instinct and innuendo” and a brilliant inventor father who was “all logic and intellect”—Selgin (Drowning Lessons: Stories, 2008, etc.) was a born misfit. Rather than trying to fit in like his more conventional brother, however, he consciously clung to his uniqueness “like the survivor of a shipwreck.” He followed his creative leanings into art school at the Pratt Institute, where he discovered that his gift for caricature marginalized him even among artists. Although he continued to draw—and at one time earn money as a caricaturist to the rich and famous—he dropped out of art school and began dreaming of a literary life. “Where drawing had led me only to surfaces,” he writes, “words (I promised myself) would take me deeper.” With the zeal of an addict, Selgin recorded every detail of his life for 10 years, only to find that his writing would become “like kudzu strangling a forest”—something that consumed rather than clarified his existence. Humbled by this and other misadventures—including an encounter with an enraged canine that would cause him to lose left-hand dexterity—Selgin abandoned all artistic posturing. In its stead, he developed a more genuine, heartfelt passion for both art and storytelling that is vividly revealed in the often hilarious but always compassionate portraits he sketches of his eccentric family, assorted oddball friends and lovers.
An engaging, original modern-day picaresque.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60938-056-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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