Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh...
A departure for a geopolitical gloom-and-doom Atlantic Monthly reporter: a book of travels to places where he’s not being shot at and whose inhabitants are not busily butchering one another.
This work is a curiosity in several respects. First, Kaplan (The Coming Anarchy, 2000, etc.) has dusted off journals from trips made as far back as the 1970s, when, fresh out of school and eager to live the Hemingway life, he headed for Europe to sharpen his aperçus. And so he did: “Marseilles taught me,” he writes in a nicely epigrammatic if self-evident turn, “that Mediterranean history was about power first, beauty second.” Second, he allows himself evident pleasure in seeing austere and difficult landscapes—an absence of gunfire, one supposes, will do that for a person—serving up crystalline sentences about “the sculpted, liver-hued steppe of northern Tunisia and the pinks of the southern deserts, with their vast blotches of salt” and oceangoing vessels that “slapped easily over the water, abounding with fish and sponges.” Elsewhere he ponders the deep history of Mediterranean lands, even engaging in brief flights of fancy, as when he imagines a moment with the well-traveled and learned Roman emperor Hadrian, who “would pause, perhaps, before a sculpture of Praxiteles, while remembering his dead lover Antinous.” Kaplan’s occasional Durrellesque, and presumably recent, grumblings about how places like the suburbs of Athens have been ruined by modernity (“sex shops and auto parts stores lined what in ancient times was the Sacred Way”) aside, this is at heart a young man’s story, sometimes self-conscious, sometimes a little too proud, one that takes pains to affirm that, as an adage has it, you can only know a foreign place after spending a winter there—as Kaplan has so often done, and in so many distant venues.
Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor: a standout travel book, and a literate companion to places less remote than Kaplan now haunts.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50804-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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