Twenty years and countless upheavals later, Manchester has set out unblinkingly to revive Camelot: from the initial invocation of Malory to the photos captioned "The Perfect Couple" to the concluding thoughts on the historical Arthur and the heroic Jack Kennedy. This is a book, moreover, that people will either love or hate—written in the elegiac, buddy-buddy mode of Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye and, as regards Manchester himself, in the second person. For Jack and Jackie's wedding, for instance, "you were billeted with Wilmarth 'Lefty' Lewis, the Waipole scholar who, having married an Auchincloss, was Jackie's step-uncle." Apropos of Jackie's Francophile influence on Jack's wardrobe: "Probably Jackie was also responsible for those presidential harangues about your shirts, which, he insisted, were not only unstylish but appeared to be soiled; didn't you change them at least four times daily?" Anecdotes also feature the likes of Red Fay, a.k.a. The Redhead and Grand Old Lovable (as in "Grand Old Lovable watched his friend give himself an injection"). On the personality, the family, politics, the presidency, you've read it all before—back when. (With time have come some jabs at the "liberal intellectual community.") In the large, there's both plain truth ("His greatest triumph. . . was his resolution of the Cuban missile crisis") and sheer glorification ("his most appealing legacy lies in his compassion"). But all the old photos are here, along with a few new ones, in a capacious album that does indeed make the Kennedy days look glamorous again.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0316545112
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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