An affectionate family scrapbook crafted with a bittersweet blend of humor and pathos.
A daughter’s loving tribute to her famous father and the iconic Manhattan apartment building that housed their family’s joys and sorrows.
Copywriter Heller’s (Splinters, 1991, etc.) family memoir brims with warm reflections right from the opening chapters, in which she describes the genesis of her parents’ fiery, robust marriage abetted by the author’s persistent grandparents. Together, they not only prevented Heller’s mother Shirley from succumbing to her premarital “crumbling courage,” but, in 1952, they also secured a surprisingly available apartment inside the grand Upper West Side tenement, the Apthorp, where the Hellers would live out the duration of their marriage. Heller notes that her father and his willful mother-in-law might have locked horns more often had they not had the familial bond uniting them, since she’d supported the newlyweds early on in their marriage until the author was born. The author sprinkles intermittent snapshots throughout the book, as she offers a succession of anecdotes and memories of summers on Long Island with her “inveterate fabulist” Grandma Dottie, family holidays and her father’s friendships with artist Irving Vogel, Mario Puzo and Swedish publisher Per Gedin. She traces his nine-year progression while composing his defining work, Catch-22, “hunt-and-pecking his way to more opulent times,” and reaping the notoriety and upgraded lifestyle the novel and its movie version would bring his family. Heller chronicles the family’s various residences and histrionics inside the Apthorp as it became a much-revered, eccentric celebrity roost, and she is generously candid and evenhanded about the family’s happier days, her father’s later novels and the darkness of her parents’ marital discord and their separate, debilitating illnesses. Closing personal recollections offered by authors Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Buckley are entertaining, but Heller gets the last word in a surprising disclosure that she has yet to read Catch-22.
An affectionate family scrapbook crafted with a bittersweet blend of humor and pathos.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9768-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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