Again, as in Cruising Speed (1971), Buckley takes us day by day, sometimes hour by hour, through a week or so in his busy, busy life—in this case eight days from the fall of 1981. There is lots of National Review business, of course, including the consideration of an expensive lease renewal. ("I ponder the extraordinary hold on you that a property, and an area, can develop.") There are a couple of speeches to prepare and deliver, letters to answer, phone calls to parry. Buckley muses on his reasons for writing, for working hard: "Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio, and the fear of boredom." (He then goes on, patronizingly, to explain what recta ratio means—and to consider the "appeal of generic Latin terms.") He reminisces—about a sailing trip with Ronald Reagan, Jr., about his prep school, about his brief CIA stint, about a column in which he mistakenly maligned Pat Boone. ("I was terribly grieved at the hurt I had done him," Buckley concludes, but his description of the incident is actually blithe, insensitive, and self-aggrandizing.) He tapes television's Firing Line, gets a phone call from "my old friend the commander-in-chief," sails with David Niven and publisher Sam Vaughan, heaps praise on assorted friends and family, plugs several of his books, goes to Mass, wrestles with a few current issues, carries on a number of little feuds. And some of this, perhaps, may engage those easily dazzled by name-droppings—or by little peeks into Life with the Buckleys. ("I completed my notes, and are the perfect chicken sandwich Gloria brought me, with a glass of cool white wine. Pat came in, en route to her lunch, and we discussed the weekend plans, and she told me now don't forget that my black tie and cummerbund were in the pocket of my tux, and I promised I'd remember, and walked down the stairs with her, saw her out, and dangled for a minute over the harpsichord.") But, while Buckley's self-congratulation can be marginally palatable when mixed with a story (as in Atlantic High or Airborne), here it's undiluted. So most readers will probably find this tedious at best, sleekly loathsome at worst—especially since, in contrast to the fairly stylish Cruising Speed, it's sloppily written (p. 169: "It was all great fun"; p. 171: "All this was great fun") and virtually without texture.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1983
ISBN: 0316114499
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
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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