A collection of short places, largely critical, occasionally autobiographical, which provide a commentary of personal perception and original insight and subtle stimulus on the passing literary scene. If much of what Graham Greene interprets is shaded, slanted a private vision, a consciousness of sin and salvation which is applied to the terminal judgment, this is what lends the purpose if at the same time a bias of his analytic method. It is particularly evident in the five pieces on Henry James, "the puritan with a nose for the Pit", and the "sense of evil, religious in its intensity" which brought him to the of Catholicism. And although it was Marjorie Bowen's The of Milan which was to direct Greene toward a lifetime of writing, it is Henry James who casts a constant shadow in the many pieces here, on the divers figures of Conrad, Mauriac, Beatrix Potter, Samuel Butler, Francis Parkman, Havelock Ellis, Herbert Read, Fielding and Sterne, etc. etc. And a closing personal postscript, on a time when at 17 he was "fixed in boredom" and tested the temptation of a brother's gun, of a wartime scene, a film luncheon and "the voice of American capital"- Louis B. Mayer, of a book market, — complete the collection in which the estimates are sparked by the individual response and an inward view. For an appreciative, rather than an appreciable, market.
Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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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