Graceful, respectful and achingly honest.
Novelist Nunez (Salvation City, 2010, etc.) recalls her years with her longtime friend Susan Sontag (1933–2004).
Nunez, nearly 20 years Sontag’s junior, was working at the New York Review of Books when she first met the woman with whom she would share an apartment and with whose son she would share a romantic relationship. In 1976, Sontag, recovering from breast-cancer surgery, employed Nunez to deal with the piles of correspondence that had accumulated during her illness, and their relationship quickly evolved into a friendship. Nunez mostly eschews traditional chronology for the anfractuous avenues of memory, following them wherever they take her; they take readers to some amusing, painful, difficult and illuminating places. We learn that the white streak in Sontag’s hair was her actual hair color, and the rest was dyed. She admired William Gass and Joan Didion. She bit her nails, hated teaching and rarely prepared for readings. She did not carry a purse. She was funnier than many thought. Her work habits were ferocious but erratic. She liked to read a book every day, but she had no routine or writing schedule. When she was ready to write, she worked day and night, popping pills to stay awake. She was bisexual. Psychologically, it seems, she was surprisingly fragile; she needed to be the center of attention, insisted others do what she wanted to do and felt she never received the respect or money due someone of her talents (she was very impressed with her own talents). Nunez struggles mightily to be fair, but there are times when Sontag just flat pissed her off. Sometimes, says the author, she was “a Joe Louis who wanted to hurt someone.”
Graceful, respectful and achingly honest.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935633-22-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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