Survivors and fans of the era will find this to be a pleasing book of meaningful touchstones, from beer jingles to Porky’s,...
Building on Sting-Ray Afternoons (2017), Sports Illustrated writer Rushin continues his account of growing up in the 1980s heartland.
“To be in high school in the 1980s is to see yourself depicted in countless movies,” writes Rushin, enumerating such now-classic films as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club before closing the thought: “confirming your place at the center of the culture.” Sure enough: If the 1950s saw the birth of the teenager as concept and construct, the ’80s saw its apotheosis. Rushin, with a light touch of the bittersweet, recounts that he wasn’t quite the teenager of those films or of celebratory songs by the likes of the Stray Cats and Heaven 17. Instead, he writes, on the brink of adulthood, he was engrossed in books, jazz, and sports, longing not for a muscle car but for a muscle typewriter, an IBM Selectric II, “all that power in your right pinkie.” The author faced most of the usual disappointments but also a couple of unusual victories, including praise from a tough-minded feature-writing teacher who sported “a wardrobe of shirts and ties evidently acquired on the newsroom set of All the President’s Men” and, eventually, publication in Sports Illustrated, his home ever since. Rushin’s account of a sibling-crowded, busy youth in suburban Minneapolis is affectionate and often funny. For example, he writes about resisting his parents’ call to move out via the siren call of newly born cable TV, which urged instead that he lash himself to the basement and stay put, and of the other blandishments of junk culture, including processed-food sandwiches “tasting of salt and moist paper towel." Though without the gritty depth of Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, situated a few years later, Rushin’s account captures many slices of life in a time fast receding into the depths of nostalgia.
Survivors and fans of the era will find this to be a pleasing book of meaningful touchstones, from beer jingles to Porky’s, love, and baseball.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41943-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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