A fawning volume that focuses on the first 50 years of the celebrated writer, aviator (Lindbergh was the first woman to qualify as a glider pilot), and wife of the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. Hertog, a freelance journalist and photographer, acknowledges early on that she is star-struck, revealing that the woman she calls “Annie” was “my mentor and my friend”—even before they’d met. After a chance encounter with Lindbergh in an airport in 1985, Hertog “pursued” her, eventually interviewing her ten times during the ten years she devoted to the biography. The book, Hertog’s first, begins in 1927. Charles has returned to North America from his solo flight across the Atlantic and is the world’s first mega-celebrity; Anne is a daughter of privilege (her father is Ambassador to Mexico). The two eventually meet, quickly marry, and spend much of their subsequent lives flying all over the world and dodging a predacious press corps. Hertog covers in some detail the two most controversial periods of the Lindberghs’ lives—the 1932 kidnaping and murder of their son and the deep admiration that both Lindberghs felt for Nazi Germany in the pre-WWII years. (Charles was an early and enthusiastic proponent of eugenics.) In prose often precious, Hertog strives mightily to portray Anne as a gifted woman caught in the amber of convention, but another Anne emerges instead—a woman of wealth and leisure, an arrogant, deeply self-centered woman, racist and anti-Semitic (like her husband), whose treacly little books, packed with truisms, enjoyed lengthy stays on best-seller lists. In 1957, poet and critic John Ciardi was the first to declare Empress Anne wore no clothes, but Hertog dismisses him as a “womanizer” who suffered from “spiritual turmoil.— (By contrast, Anne’s sexual infidelity brought her “consolation.—) Although Herzog claims to have lifted Lindbergh’s “mask,— she reveals little, and instead paints on her subject yet another false, flattering face. (84 b&w photos, some not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-46973-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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