Proficiently recognizes and restores an important American voice.
An authorized, entirely sympathetic account of the wildly popular humorist poet who composed as facilely for the New Yorker as for Hollywood and Hallmark Cards.
In his day (1902–71), Nash was America’s most prominent purveyor of snappy rhyming verse. Enjoying a fairly privileged childhood in Rye, N.Y., and in Savannah, Ga., where his father ran a prosperous business, he attended private school and then Harvard for a year, dropping out to make his way to New York. He worked at various publishing houses during the Depression, and his poems began to appear regularly in the Saturday Evening Post. His long association with the New Yorker began under Harold Ross and continued until his [Nash’s] death; “the restorative Nashian couplet or clarifying stanza” (as Roger Angell described it) attracted just the sort of readership the magazine wanted. Still, Nash struggled to make a living, keep wife Frances in comfort, and raise two daughters, both of whom became talented writer/illustrators. He worked briefly in Hollywood as a screenwriter (without credit) on The Wizard of Oz, and he had some success as a Broadway lyricist, most notably for Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus in 1942. But exhausting reading circuits were more lucrative, though they ruined his health. The tireless Nash also wrote children’s books and made frequent appearances on such TV shows as Masquerade Party. Retired lawyer and neophyte biographer Parker’s cheery work presents Nash’s life as straightforward and blameless—much like his poetry, which gently satirizes family issues, politics, and human foibles. But the author’s lack of training in literary history means that his account somewhat scants the ideas and currents that buoyed Nash. Perhaps, in the end, a light poet doesn’t lend himself to psychoanalysis. The ample quotations from Nash’s poetry are certainly a pleasure.
Proficiently recognizes and restores an important American voice.Pub Date: April 29, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-637-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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