Longtime fans will naturally savor Codrescu’s idiosyncratic ambling and real-life reflections. New readers will find...
Poet, essayist and novelist Codrescu (Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments, 2011, etc.) examines the oft-sensationalized “death of print” and redefines its place in the bigger picture of literary history.
Part cultural critique, part portrait of the artist as a young literary revolutionary, the author’s latest is a mature look at the rise of e-printing from the vantage point of someone who has already experienced, and survived, a number of technological revolutions. Codrescu recounts his growth as a writer, from his childhood in Romania to his tenure as a professor at LSU, tracing his journey through the “archives” of his life, which frequently spill over into footnotes. These footnotes go on for pages, offering insight into autobiographical and historical information that literally surrounds the primary body of text. Readers may ruminate on the footnotes as a simultaneous representation of old-fashioned marginalia at its finest and a Wikipedia-like informational hall of mirrors. Or, thin on patience, they may ignore them altogether. Codrescu’s self-proclaimed “referential injoking” may try that same patience, but what elevates the author’s argument is his understanding that what technology has actually defeated isn’t writing or publishing (if anything, there’s more of both of them than ever); it’s “the flaws, the failures, the typos, the sweat, the traces of the human on the material,” the works and remnants that ground a text in a real, flawed world. The pixelated kingdom, Codrescu observes, is highly ordered and smudge-free, occupying neither space nor time, like a virtual vapor that leaves no sensual trace for future generations of scholars and readers to study and treasure.
Longtime fans will naturally savor Codrescu’s idiosyncratic ambling and real-life reflections. New readers will find philosophical nuggets after some digging.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9838683-3-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: ANTIBOOKCLUB
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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 2025 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.
