Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his...
Artist and author Brechneff (Homage: Encounters with the East, 2007) chronicles his 30-year courtship with the Aegean isle of Sifnos, recalling his passages of self-discovery, development as a painter and ambivalence over his island identity.
Punctuated by spare, evocative sketches—seascapes, landscapes, portraits—the book, written with Brechneff’s partner, Lovejoy, is no mere travelogue of an idyllic retreat, but something of a sociological study as well as an examination of sexual confusion and the perils of adopting a persona that becomes a behavioral trap. Brechneff was born in 1950 in the Belgian Congo, the son of a Russian émigré father and a Swiss mother. Feeling like an alien in Switzerland in his teens, he was drawn not only to the romance of island life, but to the prospect of being cut off, freed from the strictures of proper Swiss society in a culture that seemed lodged in another century. On Sifnos, he found limitless inspiration, warmth and hospitality, but also deeply ingrained traditions and habits. Each summer, beginning in 1972, Brechneff basked in the Greek light and reveled in his new skin. Pictures poured out of him, leading to increasing success in London and New York. The author’s alluring narrative combines erotic liaisons with vivid portraits of islanders and visitors, though the sheer number of these encounters and friendships renders them less distinct in the end. He wavers between being unusually self-aware and tiresomely self-absorbed, engaging about his work but preoccupied with sexual longings and conquests, often depicting himself as a caricature of the voracious young omnisexual. Yet his candor is winning, and hard to resist, as we follow his growth from naïve young man to worldly, accomplished adult.
Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his life in Europe and America. Yet, happily, the author seldom strays far from his beloved island refuge, even when its enduring entreaty begins to wane.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0374166717
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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