A useful book for any young writer, and a must for fans, this is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully...
Generous, lucid, and passionate, King (Hearts in Atlantis, 1999, etc.) offers lessons and encouragement to the beginning writer, along with a warts-and-all account of a less-than-carefree life.
The composition of this memoir, King’s first nonfiction work since Danse Macabre, was interrupted when he was almost killed by a drunk driver in 1999. The first portion of it shares the making of the writer: his impoverished but experientially rich childhood, his first efforts and influences, the threadbare existence he and his wife Tabitha lived until the publication of Carrie, and his remarkable success thereafter. There are some delightful anecdotes here. In a late-night creative frenzy, his wife sleeping in their London hotel room, King asks the concierge for a place to write and is led to Rudyard Kipling's desk. Though intimidated, King proceeds to write the beginnings of Misery, then thanks the concierge, who tells him, “Kipling died there actually. . . . While writing.” King discusses his problems with drugs and alcohol and offers an assessment of his own work (he doesn’t think much of Insomnia or Rose Madder, but he liked Cujo and regrets that he was too drunk at the time to remember writing any of it). Written largely while recovering from his accident, the rest of the memoir answers the questions King hears from aspiring writers, as well as the questions they should be asking, but don't. With examples that reach from T.S. Eliot to pulp fiction, there's much trenchant material here on how to construct a story, how to revise, and how to go about building a career. King stresses character and situation over plotting, and insists on basics—like Strunk and White and, above all, endless reading and writing. While his proposed output might intimidate some, his enthusiasm wins out.
A useful book for any young writer, and a must for fans, this is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully vulgar, sometimes adolescent in his humor, sometimes impatient with fools, but always sincere in his love of language and writing.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85352-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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