Some will appreciate Alexander’s recollection of rap’s bling-bling ’90s, while others will be haunted by the portrait of his...
A mix of young-black-journalist memoir and rural family history, told with plenty of analytical flossing.
Alexander introduces himself by noting of his Sandusky, Ohio, upbringing, “Niggas always accusing Buckeye niggas of acting white, but that’s a small-town thing.” His debut’s most charming moments depict the conflicting influences on his childhood of his strict mother and his mostly absent father, locally notorious for gangster glamour and an abbreviated singing career. Delbert appears only sporadically in his son’s life, but provides this memoir’s strongest element: Alexander adeptly dramatizes the hard equations that befell generations of African-American men, ranging in Delbert’s instance from youthful addiction, violence, and imprisonment to humiliating stints at factory work and selling Confederate flags. Far less powerful is Alexander’s exhaustive evocation of his own post-adolescence, a druggy idyll of underground radio, school-newspaper controversies, interracial sex, and slacker angst—hardly novel memoir material, notwithstanding numerous references to and encounters with West Coast rappers. His rapid success as a California-based freelance journalist is recalled in aggressive prose that combines hip-hop freestyling with Mailer-esque affect. Yet this personal narrative devolves into a dreary final third, as Alexander’s relationship with his long-suffering wife deteriorates and he concentrates on racking up human-interest stories on “difficult” athletes like Alonso Spellman and Latrell Sprewell. The author seems incapable of writing about the cultural milieu he loves without projecting his own persona as its epochal center, and his striving to be “the only hip-hop journalist who mattered” becomes increasingly wearying. Despite various shrewd observations (e.g., terming sports journalists “the ultimate hangers on”), Alexander comes off by the end as yet another under-40 culture flack with mutational self-esteem.
Some will appreciate Alexander’s recollection of rap’s bling-bling ’90s, while others will be haunted by the portrait of his delinquent father.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4602-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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