Heartfelt tribute to a kind and wise teacher, though the author seems to have kept the best words of wisdom for himself.
The Anglo-American humorist tells of visits to a wise and understanding spiritual guide. Instead of Morrie on Tuesdays, make it a Catholic ecclesiastic in an English monastery—and tick up the prose a notch.
This inspirational saga starts with Hendra’s 14-year-old hand where it should not have been: under the skirt of cute, friendly, topless Mrs. Bootle. To instruct him in proper hands-off manners, the devout Mr. Bootle hauled him off to the Isle of Wight and the attentions of the Benedictine brothers of Quarr Abbey. (Ah, those Dickensian proper nouns!) There, he came under the aegis of kindly, sweet, and surpassingly understanding Father Joe, who resembled a cartoon monk down to his knobby knees and flat feet—the late Edmund Gwenn could have played Joe to perfection. Thus, young Hendra’s brief excursion beneath a lady’s dirndl led to his epiphany: He would become a teenage monk. Naturally, that didn’t come to pass. Before the author found his true vocation as writer and sometime performer of comedy, he headed for Cambridge and the continent for a proper education. Rather than a monkish tonsure, he encountered Beyond the Fringe. “I went into that theater a monk. I came out a satirist,” he writes. The sporadic visits to Father Joe at Quarr Abbey become less frequent. The story becomes more about Tony than Joe. We learn more about wives and sometime reluctant fatherhood, the career and thoughts of clever Tony than the saintliness of the dear cleric. The writing is certainly quite smart. (One oddity: Hendra eschews capitalization of the Name of the Deity, a convention religiously observed over 20 years ago in the hilarious parody Not the Bible, which he co-authored.) And so the memoir turns into a writer’s autobiography and a showbiz story.
Heartfelt tribute to a kind and wise teacher, though the author seems to have kept the best words of wisdom for himself.Pub Date: May 25, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6184-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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