Of a piece with revisionist Westerns à la Larry McMurtry and Richard White and of much interest to readers along the border.
A native son takes a loping tour of the Lone Star State and the paths to, through, and from it.
Intercept national editor Hodge (The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, 2010), a former editor of the Oxford American and Harper’s, grew up down on the Rio Grande and learned how to handle a rope and a six-shooter, the whole package. He got out at 18, and, he writes, “I’m still gone.” That kind of talk can get a person branded as a carpetbagger, but the author has long lines of history and blood tying him to the state over a couple of centuries, exploring which is the point of this somewhat shapeless but always interesting ramble across the state and points beyond, from the pioneer trails of Missouri to the gone-west paths across New Mexico and Arizona to California. Some of Hodge’s explorations are bookish: he’s a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, wandering around the vicinity of Del Rio contemplating No Country for Old Men and other “messages from lost worlds, artifacts of vanished histories.” Elsewhere, Hodge calls on the Border Patrol, ponders the lost ways of the Comanche Trail and the ever speculative argonauts, and visits the grave of Sam Houston’s Cherokee wife and a much-contested shrine constantly beset by what one defender calls “the Satanics from Juárez.” Hodge’s suggestion that the “official” history of Texas, whatever that might be, excludes many of its players, from Native Americans to French buccaneers and German freethinkers, isn’t quite accurate; no modern writer on Texas dares overlook them, and even the old-timers along the lines of J. Frank Dobie and John Graves recognized how diverse Texas was and is. Still, Hodge does a nice job of relating some of those lesser-known stories.
Of a piece with revisionist Westerns à la Larry McMurtry and Richard White and of much interest to readers along the border.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-96140-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
