A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.
The story of a man who exalted personal responsibility for systemic change.
In this combination of memoir and political critique, Jensen (Journalism/Univ. of Texas; Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog, 2013, etc.) pays homage to Jim Koplin (1933-2012), his mentor, friend, and lover. The two met in 1988, when Jensen was a University of Minnesota graduate student researching feminist responses to pornography, and Koplin, a volunteer at the Organizing Against Pornography office, agreed to be interviewed. Despite their 25-year age difference, the men felt an immediate bond, which they discovered stemmed from traumatic pasts. Koplin’s father had been violent; Jensen’s youth, which likely involved sexual abuse, was so troubled that he had developed dissociative amnesia. They both felt “not-normal,” recognizing similar quirks in each other as their friendship deepened. Although Koplin resisted being called Jensen’s “intellectual guru,” he was clearly more than an academic mentor, offering guidance through long conversations and abundant letters. Jensen admits that he was “inadequately prepared” for graduate work: naïve, not well-read, and unable to think critically about political, social, ethical, and environmental issues. On the subject of sex and gender, for example, he had been “an apologist for patriarchy” until Koplin pushed him to “think in terms of hierarchy and power” and leave his “liberal bubble” for “a more radical, and honest, analysis of myself and the world.” Portraying himself as “a pretty typical American,” Jensen believed that a “conventional narrative of U.S. benevolence” justified foreign policy, until Koplin gave him a “crash course” about U.S. relations in the Middle East. The author praises Koplin's “comprehensive and consistent radical left/feminist/anti-racist/ecological politics,” his frugal lifestyle, and his rejection of consumerism.
A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-618-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
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
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