Parts of this will resonate deeply with certain readers, while others may wonder about the point of it all.
A memoir that proceeds by stealth and cunning, rewarding patient readers with some fine writing and provocative insights, though the short vignettes generate little narrative momentum.
A little past the 100-page mark, Rosenblatt (English and Writing/Stony Brook Univ.; Making Toast: A Family Story, 2010, etc.) asks, “Are we getting anywhere? Luckily we’re not going anywhere, so there’s nowhere to get.” And so it seems within this elliptical and evocative mixture of memory and dream. “[A]nyone can write a memoir about the events of a life,” writes the author near the end. “To do something originally yours, you must write about the dreams of your life, which are best disclosed in things you already know.” Despite the subtitle, the text more often is autumnal in tone, written by the septuagenarian author and writing professor to whom the “boy detective” is father (in the Wordsworth-ian sense). Though the present and the past of his native Gramercy Park blur and blend, it really isn’t one of those New York memoirs; only in certain sections does it offer what the author terms “the poem of the city.” The narrative hopscotches back and forth across decades and neighborhoods, daring readers (often addressed directly, sometimes as students, more often as pals) to solve the mystery or determine what the mystery might be. While belaboring the connection between the detective’s mission and the writer’s, he shows a safecracker’s precision in his reflections on death, truth and how the writer deals with both. Yet he resists letting readers pin him down. “Yours is the clarity, the shape and the theme,” he writes. “Mine is the shambles. And if I say that I am lost in admiration of you, while that is true, it is truer that I am lost, period, lost in everything. Nonetheless, I proceed even without a course or destination.”
Parts of this will resonate deeply with certain readers, while others may wonder about the point of it all.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-224133-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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