Another tame biographer lamely follows the call of Jack London's wild life. Kershaw, like many London biographers, suffers from an anxiety of reference, which started with the subject himself. London's bestselling versions of his life established him as not merely the California-bred, Klondike-hardened creator of the classic boys' adventure stories White Fang and The Call of the Wild, but also a celebrity—adventurer, drinker, sailor, war correspondent, socialist, revolutionary, though never wholly any of these. A self-educated literary Ragged Dick, London found his authorial calling after enduring miserable poverty, factory jobs, and rough living as a wharf rat, oyster-bed raider, and seal hunter. Rising mainly by obsessive determination, he would churn out reams of short stories, muck-raking articles, socialist tracts, and general ephemera before his death in 1924 at age 40. Adding to this voluminous output, his second wife, Charmian, would devote two volumes to him, The Book of Jack London, and his elder daughter by his failed first marriage, Joan, tried to work out their difficult relationship in Jack London and His Daughters, as well as a full-scale biography. Without making any contribution of his own, Kershaw, a contributing editor to GQ, patches together his work from these sources, as well as the two main London biographies, Irving Stone's romantic Sailor on Horseback (1938) and Richard O'Connor's stolid Jack London: A Biography (1964). The result mixes novelistic scenes and reconstructed dialogue with half-digested research and Cliff Notes summaries of London's works. Nowhere is there any real analysis of his contradictory character—the passionate socialist would take yellow journalism assignments from Hearst, his socialism was overshadowed by his social Darwinism—nor any significant attempt, aside from local color, to place him in the context of his wild times. In trying to track down the real Jack London, Kershaw retraces everyone else's footsteps. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen; maps)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18119-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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