Brokaw’s account lacks the depth and fire of Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality (2013), but it belongs on the same shelf as a...
Veteran news anchor and Greatest Generation chronicler Brokaw (The Time of Our Lives, 2011, etc.) turns inward to report on his battle with cancer.
It began with a constantly aching back—nothing out of the ordinary for a hard-riding septuagenarian who “attributed it to long plane rides and an active lifestyle.” Not only that, writes the author in this wryly good-natured memoir, but he also had a kind of baseless confidence that, even entering his mid-70s, he was untouchable, full of “the false sense of assurance of someone who’d had a long, uninterrupted run of personal and professional good fortune.” All that comes crashing down early on in his book, when his doctor reads aloud a column of numbers, remarks on a spike in the protein cells, and then calmly announces that he has a malignancy—and worse, multiple myeloma, which can be treated but, so far, not cured. Given a prognosis of five or more years before the Grim Reaper comes knocking, Brokaw looks back on a long career in the news, with a name-dropped cast of characters, a surprising number of whom suffered or have suffered from terrible illness. In that light, the author does not incline to self-pity, taking instead an almost scholarly interest in his disease and approvingly quoting his friend and contemporary Jim Harrison, who remarks, “As I aged, I expected to think about death far more than I do.” Death is a reality here, to be sure, and Brokaw is fascinated by all its trappings, writing of MRIs and blood tests and insufferable doctors (“The Sloan specialist in charge of structural issues was a forty-three-year-old with a big résumé, a brusque style, and apparently not much interest in face-to-face consultation”) and all the rest.
Brokaw’s account lacks the depth and fire of Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality (2013), but it belongs on the same shelf as a wise and oddly comforting look at the toughest news of all.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6969-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
