An illuminating memoir by an admirable writer and leader.
The noted Czech dramatist and politician turns in a “strange little book” recounting his years in office.
The castle in question is the one in which Havel (The Art of the Impossible, 1997, etc.) lived while serving for 13 years as the Czech president. To judge by his occasional grumblings, the castle is at times Kafka’s, too. Havel blends formal memoir, vignette, anecdote and notes and memos scribbled out to assistants and ministers, sometimes impatiently (“I’ve written the first draft of the German speech…. As usual I would welcome it if there were no…micro-essays on the margins of the theme.”) He opens his narrative at the Library of Congress and immediately heads down memory lane to his first trip to the U.S. in 1968. Velvet Underground albums in hand, he came home just in time to face down the Soviet tanks that crushed the period of political liberalization known as the Prague Spring; he would be in trouble with one authority or another until 1989 and the Velvet Revolution, whereupon he was pushed into office by popular acclaim. Havel likens this, not entirely positively, to a fairy tale, “if not pure kitsch,” but it is quite clear that he took his duties most seriously in office, wrestling with such problems as how to effect the desired separation of Czechoslovakia into two republics and reconcile his own inclination toward pacifism with supporting NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and, at the end of his final term, the invasion of Iraq. Throughout, Havel is literary without being arch, nicely philosophical and a little worried about the state of the world—and even vexed by such things as American television’s running commercials during the funeral of his friend John Paul II. And then there are always the details of living in a castle: “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”
An illuminating memoir by an admirable writer and leader.Pub Date: May 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26641-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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