If ever a human life was a palimpsest, it was that of William S. Burroughs. Caveney’s (Shopping in Space, not reviewed) captivated biography begins with the premise that there is no knowing Burroughs without proper understanding of the myths that so insistently grew up around him; in literature, as in agriculture, the weeds say something of the soil. Caveney, a British literary scholar, is an able deconstructionist and fine writer, very much up to the particular biographical challenges presented by his subject. He notes that Burroughs’s forgettable undergraduate years at Harvard —appear to have been spent cultivating the art of invisibility, casting himself as a fugitive from an establishment of which he was a part.” Judiciously quoting Burroughs throughout, the author lingers over the thousand familiar stories about him, seems even to relish them as the primary source material this study requires. While the reader will be occasionally unpersuaded by the kinds of induction upon which Caveney’s analysis depends, the methodology is eminently useful in its discovery of the cultural nerves that Burroughs, wittingly or not, repeatedly struck. Neither is there a shortage of the more local biographical detail—who met whom, and when, and where—to which all chronicles of the Beat movement and its denizens succumb to greater or lesser extent. Caveney, for his part, is copious but not overbearing, expanding his scope to incorporate Burroughs’s influence on figures as disparate as the late rock musician Kurt Cobain, poet John Giorno, and novelist Terry Southern. Mention must here be made of the book’s remarkable graphic design. Its cut-and-paste aesthetic (with text superimposed over art) is a mirror of Burroughs’s own that, rather than distract the reader from the text, quietly reinforces the extent of this legacy, which perhaps has always been less about literature than spectacle, the odd event of seeing life enact itself over and against the words we use to describe it.
Pub Date: June 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-13725-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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