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VIRGINS AND OTHER ENDANGERED SPECIES

A MEMOIR

Wispy memoirs of growing up in the cultivated German-Jewish milieu of N.Y.C., which take on more heft as Straus—widow of the late publisher Robert Straus—recalls with verve writers like Lillian Hellman and Jerzy Kosinski. Born into a world of wet-nurses, French maids, and annual trips to Europe on great liners, Straus describes these and other now-antique phenomena. Her prose is as languid and baroque as the past she evokes recalling family and friends: her father, a celebrated man about town until his marriage; her mother, for whom music was never compensation enough for the tedium of running a large household; the family doctor, brother of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, on whose apartment wall pictures by Georgia O'Keeffe and others ``became a type of family portraiture''; the innovative founder of the Dalton School, which Straus attended; and ``old maids''—a now extinct species—who visited the family home, grateful ``for the hospitality dispensed by a member of the privileged order of matrons.'' Straus's comments on her writer friends are pithy and to the point: There's Lillian Hellman—whom Straus last saw a few weeks before the playwright's death, ill but still ``witty and wicked,'' who ``would gladly have traded all her success in exchange for the pretty kitten features of a belle, a white pillared mansion, and an indigenous Southern lineage''; Jerzy Kosinski, whom Straus had invested with a ``supernatural invincibility'' but who probably found his memories of the Holocaust too heavy to endure; Margaret Yourcenar, who had ``the beauty of perfect control''; and Bernard Malamud, the voice of the Jewish immigrants that ``continues to resonate.'' Better only to nibble at the early recollections—and then feast on the literary reminiscences: They really make the book.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993

ISBN: 1-55921-090-7

Page Count: 232

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993

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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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