A tell-all of a turbulent, alcohol-infused life recounted by the son of a literary icon.
In his memoir, Dan Fante (86’d, 2009, etc.)—the black-sheep son of writer John Fante—describes an unhappy childhood under the eye of his brooding father. After a few initial successes as a writer, John soon found himself sacrificing his art for a paycheck, writing one failed novel after another while supporting his family as a screenwriter. His son describes the seedy underbelly of the Los Angeles writing scene, recalling a father whose drinking, gambling and fury cast a long shadow over the family home. When the author became old enough to leave home, he began his adult life as a carny, surrounding himself with “dopers and drinkers, a dwarf, and a couple part-time hooker.” His downward spiral continued, and after further failings as a cab driver, vacuum-cleaner salesmen, street peddler, special investigator and part owner of a limousine service, Fante at long last found his true calling in his father’s profession. Yet beneath the writer's struggles to subsist were his even greater struggles with alcoholism. “Booze was my first love,” he writes; on least two occasions, he attempted to detox by locking himself in motel rooms until the snake and insect hallucinations died down. But these remained temporary fixes. At the end of his life, John Fante asked his son to read over a manuscript. When the novice writer remarked that the work might not find a wide audience, the seasoned author explained, “If what I write is good, then people will read it. That's why literature exists. An author puts his heart and his guts on the page.” It is a lesson Dan never forgot, and one that served him well in his own writing future. A vivid cautionary tale of a family's struggles with words, rage and the bottle.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202709-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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