Lively skirmishes with a deathly topic, giving the loss of life its due.
A finely crafted exploration of aging from gimlet-eyed essayist Shields (Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, 2004, etc.).
“My dad will be dead soon; one day I’ll be dead; despite—or perhaps because of—all the data gathered in this book, I still find these two facts overwhelming,” he writes. His 97-year-old father, “cussedly, maddeningly alive and interesting” (and a very sharp writer himself), is an endless source of vexation, continuity and fascination for Shields, whose text is part autobiography, part biography of Dad and part compendium of the brute facts of existence. These brute facts have all the delicacy of gas explosions. Examining his own body as the wheels start falling off, Shields rattles off great swarms of ineluctable disorders, diminishments and declensions that attend the human passage from plum to prune. His observations are sensitive, often funny and occasionally rueful, a glimpse of such shadows as the loss of basketball skills that once spoke loudly about being alive: “I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying but I was indestructible.” Shields’s loss of hair and waning eyesight, the ineradicable back pain, the “ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other,” may seem quotidian, but he invests the roll-call of dwindlings with a hint of bravado, his prose as exquisitely paced as the patter of a soft-shoe dancer trying to cheat the final curtain.
Lively skirmishes with a deathly topic, giving the loss of life its due.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26804-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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