Between the dizzying sums lost and gained, Zacks offers a rollicking history perfect for Twain’s countless fans.
An amusing, singular account of the world tour by the nation’s most famous humorist, chased by creditors.
Zacks (Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, 2012, etc.) journeys with Mark Twain (1835-1910) on his around-the-world tour in 1896, when he peddled his “greatest hits” to live admiring audiences in order to gain enough money to keep his creditors at home in check. Having made several disastrous investments—e.g., buying a publishing house and putting his nephew in charge and backing James W. Paige’s pie-in-the-sky mechanical typesetter—Twain also had to support his heiress wife, Livy, and three daughters in grand style in Paris. On the advice of his friend and fellow investor, oil baron H.H. Rogers, Twain turned over all of his assets, including his book copyrights and Paige stock, to his wife to avoid persecution and embarked, with Livy and middle daughter Clara, on a world tour as essentially a stand-up comedian. He offered snippets from his more hilarious material while drumming up thousands of dollars to pay the creditors. Zacks has thoroughly mined the notebooks Twain kept on the tour—which detailed his “almost bizarre” range of interests: “religious preferences in ant colonies, worst public floggings, the anonymity of executioners, the insecurities of God”—and letters home to the two daughters who stayed behind, while tracking the family’s progress across Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and London. Apparently, Twain was beginning to enjoy himself immensely, and these snippets of his performances are endearing and affecting. Although the news of the sudden death of daughter Susy in 1896 dampened the family’s homecoming, Twain was able to recoup many of his losses with new publishing and magazine contracts—and thanks to the financial wiliness of Rogers.
Between the dizzying sums lost and gained, Zacks offers a rollicking history perfect for Twain’s countless fans.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53644-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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