A flawed but intriguing memoir from a diligent researcher.
A graphic designer and self-described “typography geek” tells the story behind the creation of her award-winning font, P22 Marcel.
On an antiquing trip in the early 2000s, Porter acquired a series of “scratchy, old, ink-on-paper” letters written in a beautiful, unique script she wanted to use as the basis for a font design. The letters, written in French, were penned by a man named Marcel and had been posted from Berlin to Marcel’s family in France during World War II. But surface information about the letter writer was not enough for Porter, who would spend the next decade carefully crafting the font she would name in Marcel’s honor. The more she studied the letter shapes, the more she puzzled over the context in which Marcel wrote his letters, which he always ended with a deep paternal tenderness and signed with an eye-catching flourish. She began her search online, which yielded tantalizing clues. She learned that Marcel had been one of thousands of French citizens obliged to participate in a Vichy government forced-labor program that sent them to work in German factories. This information only made Porter more desirous to know whether the man she had come to think of as “my Marcel” had survived. Enlisting the aid of translators and a genealogist, the author eventually discovered that Marcel had reunited with his wife and children. More importantly, Marcel had been able to put his time as a forced worker behind him and live a happy life. The book is most interesting for the details it offers about the process Porter used to transform script into font and the search she undertook to piece together Marcel’s life story. While it is clear that the author felt a genuine connection to Marcel, consideration of why he became so personally important to her is lacking. The result is a story that obscures the reader’s relationship with the narrator.
A flawed but intriguing memoir from a diligent researcher.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1933-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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