An enlightening and entertaining blend of history and edged attitude.
Another Vowell-ian romp through history, politics, and pop culture, this time revisiting the story of Lafayette, the French contributions to victory in the American Revolution, and his farewell tour through the United States in 1824.
Readers of Vowell’s previous books (Unfamiliar Fishes, 2011, etc.) will recognize yet another pleasantly snarky work that belongs on any shelf of first-rate satire. Her peripatetic research techniques remain: visit the sites, walk the ground, read the books, talk with relevant folks (here, she recounts her chat with a Lafayette impersonator at Williamsburg). Vowell also continually yanks us back to the present, commenting sharply on such things as our current political polarization. The “sweet-natured republic Lafayette foretold,” she writes, hasn’t exactly occurred. Vowell also uses slang and cliché as light artillery, deploying them so that shells explode expectedly. When she writes that Lafayette was trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, we laugh as well as learn. Vowell takes some bayonet thrusts at religious fanatics, at the current American right, and at the brainless hatred of all things French during the Gulf War (despite the fact that the French saved us at Yorktown). Although she focuses principally on the war years, she does cover, lightly, Lafayette’s 1824 return—and (rare for her) misses an opportunity to mention that young Edgar Allan Poe, at 15 a member of the Morgan Riflemen, participated in the celebrations in Richmond. Several times, the author mentions the British spy Maj. John André but neglects to note his spectral appearances in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” But she doesn’t miss much else. Vowell reminds us of George Washington’s early failures in the war (and of those in the government who wanted to replace him) and that there used to be an “Evacuation Day” in New York City to celebrate the departure of the British.
An enlightening and entertaining blend of history and edged attitude.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-174-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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