A broad collection of pieces by the MacNeil/Lehrer commentator and author of Life Itself (1992) and Children of War (1983). (Over half of the latter is reprinted here). The ``Man in the Water'' is the heroic passenger in the 1982 air crash who pulled others from the icy Potomac and then perished. With such unforgettable, often inexplicable images, Rosenblatt connects the subject of death with ``the deepest mysteries,'' which he finds ``in facts.'' In the tradition of his heartbreaking essays on children in Cambodia, Belfast, and Lebanon, his recent essay on the Sudan describes a civilization ``on the brink of extinction.'' Some 100,000 boys walked barefoot, sometimes 1,000 miles for weeks or months, to escape the warfare that killed their families and destroyed their Sudanese villages, where Rosenblatt noticed a sign in a hospital posted for the American Ambassador that read ``thank you for coming to see us dying of disease and injuries.'' Rosenblatt conveys the horror of this desolate, isolated landscape ruled by the ``silence'' of starving children too weak to cry out and by the world's failure to recognize and respond. Always analytical, he attempts to decipher Nixon, Reagan, the Louds, Murphy Brown, ``Black Autobiography,'' Lewis Thomas facing death, the teaching of literature, and even ``beauty''—which he recognized in the presence of three elderly women who would read to him as a child. The guiding persona who seeks out morally wrenching subjects is also funny on the subjects of fast food, his attempts to diet, and his brother's telephone pranks. His iconoclastic advice to journalists is to ``betray your sources'' and to ``dwell in a state of puzzlement'' by acknowledging contradictions in people like his courtly physician father and in situations like the ``remote control'' Gulf War, where television seemed to lead away from the truth. In these acute observations and provocative stories, Rosenblatt proves himself one of America's finest and most needed commentators.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42693-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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