Eat your heart out, James Bond.
A rapid-fire biography about the improbable life of humanitarian Stefan Templeton, a “bad guy gone good because he’d never really been that good at being bad.”
Matthews (Ace of Spades: A Memoir, 2008) met Templeton in 1977, when both were the only two mixed-race children at their Baltimore school. But where the author was a skinny, fearful outsider, his friend was already revealing himself as the relentless force of nature he would become. Born to a Norwegian mother with “blood ties going back to the 900s and Olaf the Holy” and a black Vietnam vet turned philosophy professor, Templeton was a walking singularity from the start. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Europe and the United States, shuttling between the sophisticated chaos of his mother’s bohemian circles and the stable but square world of his father’s middle-class home. Though a soft “mama’s boy” at first, he learned Taekwondo from his black-belt father and became a first-class fighter, both in the dojo and on the streets. His exposure to European culture and education and the intellectual discipline of his father shaped him into a profoundly thoughtful young man—and a magnet for girls and women on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his self-confidence, Templeton lacked real direction. He attended a prestigious university-preparatory school for international students in England where he became the lover of a rich Parisian girl. From there, he went trekking through jungles in Colombia, then trained in Marseille to join the Cousteau diving team. He then drifted into the Scandinavian criminal underworld and fled to Japan, where he almost killed a man in barroom brawl. In Thailand, he experienced the unexpected spiritual awakening that transformed him from warrior criminal to warrior hero dedicated to helping those in need. Matthews’ narrative reads like “the stuff of fiction, the stock-in-trade of thrillers and James Bond movies”; it’s also an exhilarating narrative about redemption and the power of personal choice.
Eat your heart out, James Bond.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59420-296-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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