Essential for García Márquez fans, and an exemplary literary biography.
A probing biography of the 1982 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, whom Pablo Neruda hailed as a Cervantes for our time.
Martin (Modern Languages/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, 1989, etc.) begins by noting that he has been working on this life of Gabriel García Márquez for two decades. The effort shows. Born in 1927, García Márquez remains best known for the book he published when he was 40, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a generational epic whose landscape stretches from ocean to deep jungle. Martin’s signal contribution is to reveal, even more so than García Márquez did in his memoir, just how roman à clef–ish that fictional world is. Yet, of course, a particular storytelling genius is needed to bring even the liveliest real-world figures into habitation in a novel. Martin rightly notes that whereas the literature of the first half of the 20th century has several central figures—Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway et al.—that of the latter half finds only García Márquez universally acknowledged as a master. That acknowledgment took years to come, of course, and early on García Márquez was written off as a would-be Faulkner—Faulkner being one of his idols and central to the development of modern Latin American literature, a body of work in which, as Martin also observes, García Márquez’s writings appear conservative against his postmodern fellows, and even scorned for being “transparent, easy to read, and accessible even to people who only had a modest literary education.” Martin offers lucid literary commentary alongside the facts of his subject’s life, which, as is well known, was marked by excellence in journalism and controversy in politics. Though García Márquez was a noted scourger of Yankee imperialism and friend of Castro, Chavez and the like, he was not shy about having amassed considerable wealth over a long career.
Essential for García Márquez fans, and an exemplary literary biography.Pub Date: May 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27177-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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