While Hoffman doesn't capture the full spectrum of his subject's achievements and disasters, he does convincingly picture...
This brisk double profile ably traces the career of America's greatest literary celebrity, ark Twain, while drawing a full portrait of his progenitor, Samuel Clemens.
For novelist and scholar Hoffman, Clemens was an insecure if sympathetically brilliant narcissist, desperate to rewrite his past and secure his future. Thus he created the Mark Twain persona: a masterstroke of self-creation and self-promotion that Hoffman considers nothing less than the "inspired ad-hoc invention of fame.'' Hoffman seeks to reconstruct what Clemens actually experienced before he edited and capitalized on his life. Thus, the Mississippi is the tragic scene of Clemens's father's doomed struggle to support his family. Hoffman illuminates several years of Clemens's life about which he never wrote, when his teenage rebelliousness led him to leave home and become an itinerant typesetter and newspaper columnist. A career as a riverboat pilot was interrupted by the Civil War, which Clemens sat out reporting for newspapers in Nevada and California. Hoffman deftly explores the romantic relationships with men that Clemens conducted in his years out west, placing them in the contexts of both boomtown mining culture and also the literary bohemianism that Clemens increasingly came to embrace. Local fame in San Francisco led to successful lectures in the east; soon Mark Twain's brilliant travel writing was earning top dollar. But adroit as the narrative of these years is, Hoffman's account of the creation of the great novels, particularly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is thin, and by the time he reaches the eventual wreck of Clemens's investments and the tragic deaths of two of his daughters, his commentary has become less insightful. Even Clemens's final years as a terrifying iconoclast come off muted.
While Hoffman doesn't capture the full spectrum of his subject's achievements and disasters, he does convincingly picture Samuel Clemens's personality: a character interesting not least for his powerful ambivalence towards his astoundingly successful public alter ego.Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-12769-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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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