A stirring portrait of courage and endurance, but also a bittersweet tale of the vagaries of fame and fortune.
Mortimer (The Longest Night: The Bombing of London on May 10, 1941, 2005, etc.) recounts the quest of four intrepid women who in the summer of 1926 attempted to become the first female to swim the turbulent English Channel.
Nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, sponsored by Chicago Tribune owner and New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson, had tried and failed the previous year. In her 1926 attempt, she was joined by Lillian Cannon, whose conquest of Chesapeake Bay brought her the backing of the Baltimore Post; Mille Gade, who had already completed a swim around Manhattan Island; and Clarabelle Barrett, a 200-pound-plus high-school swim instructor who longed to be an opera singer. Lodged separately with their trainers and backers in the seaside French town of Cape Gris-Nez, the four waited impatiently through July for the unusually chilly, windy weather to break. Even in August, their marathon swims were made in bone-chilling 60-degree water. The absence of today’s high-tech wet suits was hardly mourned by the sponsoring newspaper editors, who saw photos of the competitors in swimsuits as guaranteed circulation boosters. (Ederle’s swim, in fact, was made in what may have been the world’s first bikini.) Mortimer’s prose is not especially colorful or evocative, but his diligent attention to detail makes this an engaging, entertaining read; the vintage news photos he unearthed are also worthwhile. Shy, introverted Ederle was better suited to the channel swim than to the media-stoked fame she experienced afterward. Hounded by well-wishers and ill-served by a greedy business manager, she found her celebrity difficult to manage.
A stirring portrait of courage and endurance, but also a bittersweet tale of the vagaries of fame and fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1595-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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