A frenetic example of pinball prose that will frustrate many.
A rambling, disjointed, sometimes amusing memoir about a car trip to Turkey and Israel that will apparently not conclude (or even truly commence) until the second volume of this planned four-volume work appears.
Zabor’s bizarre, well-received 1997 novel, The Bear Comes Home, paves the way for this dilatory tale. The idea for this book’s title came to Zabor after someone told him that “Africans” call people who drive Mercedeses “Wabenzi,” and since he plans to buy one, he concludes that he’s a member of that august clan. Early on, he tells of the disturbing deaths of his parents, narratives that he interrupts with flashbacks to his youth and with truly magical stories about his powerful Polish uncle, whose prodigious strength dazzles the author (the elderly man once defeated, with ease, a young and ripped arm-wrestling champ). Zabor makes some shocking discoveries, most notably that his mother thought she had aborted him. He also explores some of his failures, including the time, as a young man, that he arranged for a girlfriend’s abortion; the fetus was five months old. The author—slowly, slowly—leaves New York and heads to England, where he catches up with friends he’s known since the 1970s. He interweaves these recent English escapades with memories from 30 years earlier, including the long, dull closing portion (well over 100 pages) that relates his experiences at a spiritual retreat. These pages sometimes read like an unintentional self-parody. Zabor’s language vacillates between the effusive (some sentences exceed 200 words in length) and the minimalist, the sublime and the banal.
A frenetic example of pinball prose that will frustrate many.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-86547-583-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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