Curiously unresolved musings about the path that led Teachout (ed., Beyond the Boom, 1990) from small-town America to New York City. Early on, Teachout promises to explore the larger paradox of willful displacement (``I am like a million other Americans...We cannot go back; we are not at home where we are'') in the course of tracing his journey from the ``narrow and kind and decent and good'' southeastern Missouri town of Sikeston. The problem is, he doesn't. Instead, he offers an unremarkable account of an unremarkable upbringing in an unremarkable town. Like many small- town (and country and city) boys, Teachout participates in local theatricals, goes to family gatherings, strives to conquer childhood awkwardness, forms a band with high-school friends. Potentially telling events—dropping out of and back into college; impulsively deciding to switch directions from psychology to big- city journalism—are treated as mere twists of fate (``Sooner or later, people like me usually end up in places like New York...''), with no larger analysis to transform the particular into the universal. The book springs briefly to life in three essaylike chapters paradoxically set in neither Sikeston nor New York—two profiles of jazz musicians (famed big-band leader Woody Herman and a brilliant, obscure Kansas City pianist) and a nicely formed meditation on the author's brief descent into racism during an unhappy stint as a Kansas City bank teller (``...as my misery grew...I needed somebody to hate'')—but it fails as autobiography. Teachout's loving evocation of the charms of small-town life should strike some chords among the many Americans wrestling with similar feelings of dislocation. He raises some interesting, heartfelt questions; it's a shame he doesn't answer any of them.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-68351-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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