Offers no surprising conclusions, but Thompson provides a well-researched, delightfully obsessive story, suitable for...
For a year, former Washington Post feature writer Thompson chased the King of the Wild Frontier.
In this evenhanded account, the author reports that it was his young daughter’s excited response to a Burl Ives’ recording of the Disney theme song that ignited his family’s interest in the historical David Crockett. And off he went—to sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas and Washington, D.C.—pursuing the frontiersman whose story, told in the three-part Disneyland series in the 1950s, caused the coonskin-cap phenomenon that spread rapidly across the country. The author sees no need for esoteric theories about its death: “It was a fad,” he writes. As Thompson tracked Crockett, he encountered local experts just about everywhere—people who were extraordinarily generous about driving him to remote locations and sharing their hard-won knowledge. He also interviewed some scholars, visited archives, browsed (and bought) in assorted gift shops, examined relics (the real, the risible) and attended festivities at the Alamo on the 175th anniversary of the battle. He found it wrenchingly difficult at times to chip away the thick carapace of fiction from Crockett’s life. Far less is known than many people would believe. Many stories, especially about the Alamo, elicit fiery emotions, especially in Texas. Thompson also read myriads of Crockett and Alamo books, examined the career of Fess Parker (Disney’s Crockett), and watched and analyzed the major (and some minor) movies, including those starring John Wayne and Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett. Neither Wayne nor Thornton, writes Thompson, showed us even a vaguely authentic Crockett.
Offers no surprising conclusions, but Thompson provides a well-researched, delightfully obsessive story, suitable for Crockett aficionados and neophytes.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0307720894
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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