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17F

THE LIFE OF IAN FLEMING

This rushed, journalistic coverage of the fascinating Fleming only rarely lives up to its sensational and complex subject, even while dispatching many of the occluding myths around him. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Fleming did not originate the genre in which he wrote but instead gave it its enduring archetypal hero, James Bond, who in turn grafted himself onto Fleming's fame. McCormick (How to Buy an Island, 1973, etc.), Fleming's sometime junior colleague in wartime intelligence and global reporting, portrays the author as far more complex than his charismatic creation—both more ordinarily human and far more exotically eccentric. Though McCormick generally accounts for the biographical factors in Fleming's childhood (his father's death and his mother's strong nurturing) and his restless youth (studies in Germany and international reporting for Reuters), Fleming seems incomplete and distant by the time he has his crucial experience in naval intelligence in WW II under the code name ``17F.'' With these espionage operations still partially classified and permanently obscure, McCormick plays down Fleming's adventurism, with the exception of the bizarre case of Rudolph Hess. In the book's most mysterious chapter (which digs into Fleming's interest in the occult), McCormick places Fleming murkily in the plot that, by playing on Hess's superstitions and interest in astrology, lured the Nazi to England with the false promise of negotiating peace. McCormick paints a curiously selective portrait of Fleming's rise to fame—even his postwar career managing a global newspaper chain is given more attention than his turbulent marriage to the witty Lady Anne Rothermore or his phenomenally successful writing career. Although Fleming was ultimately a private character with a very public quasi-alter ego in James Bond, this thin work has the whitewashed feel of an authorized biography—but without the privileged access or intimacy with its subject.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1994

ISBN: 0-7206-0888-0

Page Count: 232

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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