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IT WASN'T PRETTY, FOLKS, BUT DIDN'T WE HAVE FUN?

ESQUIRE IN THE SIXTIES

Polsgrove (Journalism/Indiana Univ.) explores a remarkable decade in the life of a sometimes remarkable periodical. The author turns out a neat bit of literary history of the '60s, and a corporate history of Esquire at that time. It's all combined with a portrait of its influential editor, the late Harold Hayes. A serendipitous follow-up to Hugh Merrill's new narrative of the magazine's early years (p. 615), this text draws with great effect on diverse archives and the recollections of some of the important players to nail pivotal events of the epoch. Esquire's cheesecake days were over in the '60s; Esky had matured and gained a new attitude. The magazine strived for good writing and reportage rather than polemic, and more than occasionally, it was successful. Frequently, it was a literary circus. Happily, Polsgrove's book is not a simple exercise in nostalgia. It's a fond tale of the Fourth Estateof the reporters and fiction writers (and those who mixed the two disciplines) under the tutelage of Hayes, who had succeeded founding editor Arnold Gingrich and was just as forceful in imprinting a distinctive personality on Esquire. It helped, of course, that there was a concatenation of events and writers. There was JFK, LBJ, and Vietnam; Nixon, Martin Luther King, and the Chicago police riot to write about. And there was John Sack, Garry Wills, and Gay Talese; Mailer, Baldwin, and Tom Wolfe to do the writing. Malcom Muggeridge and Dwight MacDonald dispensed their views. Diane Arbus contributed pictures. George Lois did the covers. Vidal had catfights with Buckley, Mailer quarreled with everyone. The circus ended in the new decade, as it had to, with the businessmen seizing control. No dubious achievement, but rather a welcome addition to the story of American magazine journalism. (photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 1995

ISBN: 0-393-03792-4

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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