Just serviceable. Readers interested in all things Amis will want to refer to the roman à clef The Information and anxiously...
Indifferently written bio of “the best prose stylist in English…in the closing decades of the last and the opening of this century.”
Martin Amis is, of course, the famed one-time bad boy of British letters, son of Kingsley, the leader of the sort-of school of British writers numbering the likes of Ian Hamilton, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens—not a woman in the lot and for reasons that a survivor of the 1970s will probably understand. (Men did not become enlightened until later, if then.) Bradford (English/Univ. of Ulster; Poetry: The Ultimate Guide, 2010, etc.) does a yeomanlike job of wrestling this Amis to the ground, and though an academic, he is sensible enough to realize that readers will want not just the 411 on the making of, say, Dead Babies and London Fields, but the really juicy stuff: the famous (or infamous) split with his former literary agent for an American counterpart dubbed “the Jackal,” his contemporaneous exchange of a long-suffering wife for a younger and more exotic one, his expensive dental work, etc.—in short, all the gossipy items that Amis may, regrettably, be better known for than for his actual work. Bradford’s book comes alive when he shifts from life to that work, as when he writes that Amis’ middle-period novels are “exceptional partly because of their intransigent refusal to conform to the predominant tenor of his own fiction or to discernible precedents elsewhere.” The biographical material, on the other hand, is humdrum, rendered in a commaless and sometimes breathless British English that isn’t always revealing.
Just serviceable. Readers interested in all things Amis will want to refer to the roman à clef The Information and anxiously await an autobiography.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-385-1
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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