A tennis champ from the Thirties serves up memoirs, which include on-court action, movie-star friends, and credibility- defying WW II spy intrigue. The jockish Marble was the mascot of a San Francisco baseball team until her brother gave her a tennis racquet and she found her true gift. Under the tutelage of Teach Tennant, coach to the stars, Marble became a national-caliber player, but on a trip to Europe, she collapsed on the court. She was diagnosed as suffering from TB and told she would never play again. But encouraged by Teach and another of Teach's pupils, Carole Lombard, Marble learned to walk, then play, again. She went on to win Forest Hills in 1936, and then, after a long losing streak, hit her stride in the late Thirties, winning all the major titles in both singles and doubles until the advent of WW II put an end to the competitive tennis circuit. Her first romance, with a dashing Swiss banker named Hans, ended in disaster when Teach insisted that love and tennis couldn't mix. Marble was approached by US Army Intelligence and asked to go to Switzerland, where perhaps she could reconnect with her old beau Hans, suspected of aiding the Nazis in hiding their wealth. She went to teach clinics in Geneva and, sure enough, Hans contacted her; within days, she moved into his chateau. Best of luck, he drunkenly told her not only about the treasure in his vault, but where the key was hidden. She sneaked into the vault, photographed the conveniently available ledgers, and escaped—after a car chase and a shootout. Marble, who died last year, has brought lots of mildly diverting incident into play, but it all adds up to little in the way of insight, gossip, or historical flavor. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05839-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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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