A distanced portrait of an eccentric family that fails to engage.
In his debut memoir, former GQ managing editor Smith pays underwhelming homage to his father.
As interior decorator to Miami’s rich and famous, Lew Smith was celebrated for fashion-forward designs that ranged from “tropical-fantasy” to “Zen-inspired.” Wife Esther threw lavish dinner parties with swinging gay men, and the couple frequently graced the local newspapers’ society pages. The author’s early childhood in the 1950s included getaways to Havana, where his parents danced the night away while six-year-old Philip nursed rum cocktails at the bar. Gradually, Lew eschewed the ritzy nightlife in favor of a macrobiotic diet, esoteric forms of yoga and a relentless commitment to the study and practice of spirituality. To his family’s disbelief, he became a local psychic, using his “gift from God” and a trusty pendulum to heal Miami’s deaf, blind, crippled and cancer-ridden, never charging them a dime. The repetitious healing scenes fall a little too neatly into place and don’t explain much about Lew. Meanwhile, teenaged Philip began dabbling with girls, boys, electroshock therapy (to cure him of his attraction to the boys) and even Scientology, but his stabs at adolescent rebellion were continually thwarted by his father’s psychic abilities. Indeed, Smith seems more interested in Lew’s development than his own, giving only passing mention to such potentially rich subjects as his confusion about his sexual identity and his struggle to cope with his parents’ divorce. The author provides colorful descriptions of Miami, beginning in the ’50s, when it was “a big ol’ cracker swamp due east of the Everglades [where] Dixiecrats, blacks, and coral snakes summed up the population, in that order.” Regrettably, the city is a more fully realized character than any of the Smiths. By the time the author injects more of himself into the text, as he unravels the mystery of his father’s untimely death, it’s too little, too late.
A distanced portrait of an eccentric family that fails to engage.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4294-0
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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