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DOUBLE VISION

Name: DOUBLE VISION
Author: Walter Abish
ISBN: 0-679-41868-7

A MEMOIR

by Walter Abish ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2004

Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn,...

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Free-floating memories of a Viennese Jewish childhood and flight from the Anschluss, roughly stitched together in a strappingly formal voice and counterpointed by Abish’s later visit to Austria.

Readers are brought directly into the custard of novelist Abish’s (Eclipse Fever, 1993, etc.) fraught youth and pummeled with runaway questions: “What, then, did I find so disquieting? Was it the logic that dictated their shared agenda? The practical motives?” Disquiet for sure, as Abish rolls in ambiguity, indeterminacy, and equivocation like a dog in something long dead. “Was this, I wonder, my very first awareness of self-deception?” he asks when considering his family’s poor excuse for a Christmas tree in his youth. Upon returning to his childhood home years later, he “experienced a satisfaction at feeling so indifferent. It was just another house!” Surely his flight from the Nazis was a scary event, but Abish chronicles it as a series of glancing encounters: the night his family was told to leave their home in one hour’s time; his game of catch with the ghetto’s administrator, “a maniacal individual whose actions frequently bordered on unbridled lunacy.” This approach can be frustratingly elliptical, but there are some remarkably sharp isolated tableaux. Forget the evocations, look at the shadows being thrown: surviving inmates from death camps, “marched by maniacal guards . . . across the devastated landscape of Poland,” or the author’s grim realization that as an Austrian Jew he is the enemy in Israel. Anselm Kiefer provides a loophole into an episode of self-recognition for Abish, as does a tightly knit synagogue community, a mnemonic center of gravity “swaying in prayer, their voices pitched high, filling the air with such acute urgency, such passion that for once I, by heart a skeptic, a doubter, felt my resistance fade.”

Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn, Abish provides a protective distance.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2004

ISBN: 0-679-41868-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

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This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.