Scattershot.
Debut memoir about art forgery, Lithium, Bloomingdale’s, and electroshock therapy, among other things.
Behrman was born in 1962 and raised in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb. He noticed early signs of psychological instability in himself and made some preliminary attempts to get help. After graduating from college in the early 1980s, he settled in Manhattan and tried his hand at various jobs, from independent film producer to men’s-wear flack to p.r. rep. Off-hours, he wandered the Times Square area, indulging in hard drugs and hardcore sex of all kinds. In 1988, he was hired as a publicist by the artist Mark Kostabi, whose MO was a variant on the notion of name-brand apparel: Kostabi’s paintings were produced by minimally paid lackeys; he then signed each work as his own and sold it at a high price. Behrman helped pull together Kostabi’s production and publicity, then became involved in a forgery scheme within the company. Kostabi eventually found him out, and criminal prosecution ensued. Behrman was sentenced to a five-month term in a community corrections center with work-release restrictions. Meanwhile, he continued to fight his psychological compulsions—one of his many doctors diagnosed bipolar personality disorder—making numerous attempts to find the right balance of psychiatry and medication. (He was one of the original Prozac prescribees.) Out on probation, he had a manic episode that resulted in several months of electroconvulsive therapy; his battle with mania continues to this day. The first half of this reads like Brighter Lights, Bigger City without a dash of insight. Even more disappointingly, Behrman has no enlightenment to offer on the subject of manic disorders. The section on the Kostabi forgery case, however, is fascinating and worthwhile.
Scattershot.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50358-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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