These moments add up to a fresh if sidelong look at American letters, and to a work that culturally minded readers will...
Or, six degrees of Walt Whitman: a lively work of American cultural history that follows trails of acquaintanceship and influence across the generations.
Back when the world was larger but the numbers of people within it smaller, it was possible for men and women of culture to seek one another out and, by the mere act of meeting, constitute a movement of sorts that could have all manner of strange reverberations. Consider that William James once suffered an attack of angina while walking through the streets of Vienna with Sigmund Freud, at about the time Leo Stein was wandering through the hills of Tuscany with Bernard Berenson; having just read James’s Principles of Psychology, Stein was well armed with arguments to berate his sister Gertrude for “writing only on the surface and . . . lacking psychological depth,” a charge Gertrude would later level at Ernest Hemingway. Or consider the poet Marianne Moore’s meetings with the artist Joseph Cornell, who took time out from his infatuations with Marcel Duchamp and Marlene Dietrich to court her, later ruefully remarking to his sister, “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved”; Moore turned away Cornell’s offer of marriage, but, late in life, developed crushes on Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali, casually introduced to both by George Plimpton. Cohen (MFA program/Sarah Lawrence), a young scholar, peppers all this with dozens of chance encounters, some of them history-making (Mark Twain’s friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, Henry James’s with Willa Cather) and some of them mere, if sometimes elegant, moments (Charlie Chaplin’s encounter with W.E.B. Dubois at the Swiss hotel where Henry James had set Daisy Miller, Peggy Cowley and Hart Crane’s drunken viewing of a Chaplin film in Mexico City).
These moments add up to a fresh if sidelong look at American letters, and to a work that culturally minded readers will greatly enjoy.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6164-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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