For those who felt Denby lost some of the bounce in his step when he moved from New York to the New Yorker, here he is again...
A seismic disturbance rocks New Yorker film critic Denby’s life, and he turns for security, Lord help him, to the stock market of early 2000.
But money proves godless, and the experience moves the earth under his feet as dreadfully as the dissolution of his marriage. Even with the portents, the breakup of Denby’s marriage to novelist Cathleen Schine shook him like a rag doll. As things fell apart, he decided “to make money, serious money . . . so I could hold on to something very important to me,” most especially, the family’s longtime apartment on the Upper West Side, a place that anchored his memories and self. Thanks to the “giddy boom-times,” the market value of the place had reached $1.4 million. Now, Denby figured $1 million was what he needed to buy out his wife’s half interest. With the dumb, incredulous headshake of retrospect, he artfully explains his excursion into the tech stocks of millennium’s turn. But Denby is no dummy, his twitchy owlishness trying to make sense of the market, which was open to so many influences, from drab to berserk, at a time when value had no relation to earnings. Misgivings rode him like barbarians; he sought reassurance in the words and company of Sam Waskal and Henry Blodget and George Gilder, crooning visionary ecstasies that snookered him into ImClone and Corvis as they called up the philosophical and ethical implications of greed as motivation and perversion. A free-falling market forced him to consider “that our great system of democratic capitalism was just fine as long as things were going well for you,” and that “in a society like ours, which has so few communal instincts, the normal tragedies of life—losing a partner, losing a job—hurt much more than they should.” Stock market aside, Denby recounts his ungainly forays into romance, his disgruntlement with cinema, and the solace of time slowed to a human scale with his sons.
For those who felt Denby lost some of the bounce in his step when he moved from New York to the New Yorker, here he is again in full, anxious, exegetic stride.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-19294-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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