Dementedly original and unstoppable: Burroughs deserves a shelf all to himself, just as an unpredictable convict might...
Growing pains come first, then the adult pains, from the ever-odd, tragically farcical Burroughs.
“I learned that I had, in fact, been not merely kidnapped but stolen from the first family in American history,” the Vanderbilts, that is—in your dreams, Augusten. And readers will hope that many of these 27 stories are dreams, bad ones that Burroughs (Dry, 2003, etc.) cooked in his exorbitant imagination. But no, they are probably faithful renderings of his comically rendered anguish. They start with wicked swipes at his “so-called parents,” with their “Del Monte green bean breath,” and his tormenting brother: “a farm animal, a grunting primitive.” Was he not meant for something better than this, Burroughs pleads? Maybe, maybe not. He admits he was the kind of kid who “lived for television commercials” (though he is an abject failure at his one stage test); by fourth grade he “wanted to be Christine Jorgensen, the world’s first famous transsexual,” and had “decided that I would probably opt for the self-lubricating vagioplasty.” Then he gets older and stranger still. He considers poisoning his cleaning lady because she is as difficult and complicated as he is; he suffers remorse for killing a rodent that is trapped in his bathtub, then “I turned on the television and watched a little QVC. As I watched the host demonstrate the George Foreman Grill (which actually does seem easy to clean). . . .” Without missing a beat, he will note that “a handsome, hairy-chested Greek man is far better than mouth cancer,” that “I’m here to defend our Holy Fathers . . . Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life,” that “what little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan.” Honesty is Burroughs’s policy.
Dementedly original and unstoppable: Burroughs deserves a shelf all to himself, just as an unpredictable convict might require protective custody.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31594-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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