A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.
Lowbrow TV-actor-turned-congressman relates his strange life and times.
No, it’s not Sonny Bono, or even Fred Grandy. Surely no one was clamoring for a memoir from Jones, semi-famous for portraying the begrimed mechanic “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard before serving two terms as a Democratic U.S. congressman from Georgia. So this modest tome is a pleasant surprise, as he relates the events of his unlikely life with appealingly low-key charm and easy humor. Born in crushing poverty to an alcoholic railroad man and his defeated wife, the author grew up in a shack in Virginia, following in his dissolute father’s footsteps while racking up failed marriages and stints in jail. But he yearned for something better, haphazardly cultivating an interest in literature and theater between blackouts, eventually finding sobriety and gainful employment maintaining the Duke boys’ General Lee on network television. Jones’s account of his dark years is perhaps too restrained; he alludes to various categories of bad behavior and leaves it at that. The book really picks up steam with his post-Dukes congressional career, a development that surprised Jones as much as anyone. He dishes freely, delightedly reporting on the crookedness and venality of the party machinery that opposed him. The case for campaign-finance reform has seldom been made so entertainingly as in his account of an underfunded and idealistic outsider running afoul of institutionalized graft, corruption and hypocrisy. (Newt Gingrich won’t be providing a blurb.) A late highlight of the narrative is Jones’s trip to Tiananmen Square, where he violated diplomatic protocol and staged a small protest in the name of the murdered student protestors, infuriating the Chinese brass. That gesture sums up his public life: small-scale, sincere and sympathetic to the little guy. Jones currently curates a phenomenally successful annual Dukes of Hazzard fan festival at which “Crazy Cooter” remains a major draw. God bless America.
A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39527-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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