Veteran writer Jerome (Stone Work, 1989; Staying with It, 1984, etc.), a former magazine columnist and editor, evokes in diary form a year in his writing life, measuring out the days in seasoned spoonfuls of insight and effort. ``At age fifty-seven I find myself still learning to work,'' writes Jerome. Despite eight books and hundreds of articles, he calls himself ``a competent but essentially invisible writer,'' a craftsman daily struggling to build spare, honest sentences. According to this ex-sportsman, writing such sentences is the best and most demanding sport there is—``a moral act'' that ``establishes a truth that somehow authenticates you''—but a writer must learn to fight through thickets of confusion and distraction to reach those beautiful glades of clarity and insight. Not the least of the thorny problems is money (or, rather, the lack of it), and here Jerome criticizes a publishing business that lavishes the bulk of its energy and cash on a relative few huge commercial properties while books by lesser-known writers like the author himself appear and disappear with barely a nod from the public or media. In these entries, Jerome anxiously awaits the reviews of Stone Work, only to watch it slip from the bookshelves by the end of the year. He consoles himself, and the reader, by noting the abundant small pleasures of his life (he walks his dogs every day at noon, drinking in the seasonal changes in his western Massachusetts landscape). And he also offers tips for other writers, including a useful schema for writing a nonfiction book that involves breaking a subject into manageable categories. A charming and worthy tour of one writer's life, practiced as he preaches.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-82885-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
