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MOCKINGBIRD SONGS

Name: MOCKINGBIRD SONGS
Author: Wayne Flynt
ISBN: 978-0-06-266008-4

MY FRIENDSHIP WITH HARPER LEE

by Wayne Flynt ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2017

A thin but welcome snapshot of the ‘real’ Lee.

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An insider’s portrait of the beloved author.

Flynt (Emeritus, History/Auburn Univ.; Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives, 2011, etc.) received his first letter from Nelle Harper Lee (1926-2016) in 1992. Over the years, they became dear friends, and this book collects their correspondence. Flynt provides revealing portraits of the very private Nelle and her sisters, Alice and Louise, and her close relationship with the Flynt family. Like the bird that inhabits the title of her famous novel, Lee was “complicated and independent” and highly protective of her family. However, as Flynt found out, once she could trust him, she was neither cold nor uncommunicative but rather “empathetic, warm, nonjudgmental, and a wonderful conversationalist.” Her letters are often chatty, funny, and satirical. The correspondence explores racial issues, personal matters, and the state of Lee’s health, but there’s also a good deal of material literary buffs and fans of Lee will enjoy. Her “literary idol” was Jane Austen. She loved Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and read C.S. Lewis “voraciously.” Eudora Welty, she writes, was “my goddess, and with Faulkner, I think are the TWO.” Although Lee was ill, she did approve the publication of Go Set a Watchman and was especially pleased with its sales and the money she was making. Even though she was Truman Capote’s “oldest friend,” she knew he told others he had a hand in writing To Kill a Mockingbird, which grew out of a short story she had written. With a touch of glee, she writes, “I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold.” He “nursed his envy for more than 20 years.” Lee calls biographer Charles Shields, whom she refused to cooperate with, a “creep,” and she was livid when she found out he had included her New York City address in it: “bush-league.”

A thin but welcome snapshot of the ‘real’ Lee.

Pub Date: May 2, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-266008-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.