Talese shows in an amiably digressive way that this writer’s life has comprised not just celebrity and success, but many...
Veteran journalist Talese (Unto the Sons, 1992, etc.) revisits his youth and education.
The rather odd framing device, since the author says he was never a fan, concerns soccer. Quite by accident, Talese watched on television the American women’s shoot-out victory in the 1999 World Cup. What interested him most was the Chinese player, Liu Ying, whose blocked kick made possible the American victory. How did she feel? How was she greeted when she returned to China? Four hundred pages later, we find out when the writer crosses the Pacific to interview her. In between, Talese takes a long and winding road through his life and career, a genial journey that for the most part is both enjoyable and illuminating. Maintaining a mostly non-linear chronology, he tells us about friendships with folks like boxer Floyd Patterson and baseball manager George Steinbrenner. We learn about the author’s difficulties in high-school English, his experiences at the University of Alabama (the only college that accepted him), his decade-long career at the New York Times. “Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch,” he writes. Then Talese invites us to consider two big projects that just never worked: a book about a site in New York City that held a succession of failed restaurants (he calls it the Willy Loman Building) and a story about Lorena and John Bobbitt that Tina Brown nixed at the New Yorker. Two pieces about Selma, Ala., work out better: The writer was there in 1965 for the marches and mayhem, then returned in 1990 to research a gripping story about an interracial marriage.
Talese shows in an amiably digressive way that this writer’s life has comprised not just celebrity and success, but many false starts, failures and frustrations.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-41096-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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