Pekar fans will enjoy this minor work from a major figure.
This posthumously published collection of narratives provides footnotes on the life immortalized through American Splendor.
The pride of Cleveland and patriarch of the autobiographical comic-book narrative worked with New York artist Summer McClinton on pieces that generally reflect his life through the stories of others whom he found interesting. The opener, “Hollywood Bob,” tells the story of Cleveland’s limo driver to the stars (and to Pekar), an ex-con who ended up befriending many of the famous people he drove (including Meg Ryan, who doesn’t look familiar in McClinton’s rendering, and Leslie Nielsen, who gave the driver a “fart machine”). Then there’s a series of narratives on “Tunc & Eileen” and their many changes of jobs and partners before finding each other and telling their stories to Pekar. “Neighborhood Spark Plug” is the most compelling of the narratives, detailing the life of one of Pekar’s buddies and his ill-fated adventures in trying to restore and relocate a diner before returning to an expanded version of his toy store with delights for adult collectors. The longest and last piece is the title story, recounting Pekar’s trip to a book festival in West Virginia, after the interest from the film version of American Splendor had died down (and his speaking fee had dropped from the thousands into the hundreds). Like much of the collection, it’s a minor slice of life that doesn’t really build to any particular point, except as the book reflects the narrator’s obsession “to get the details of the story right.”
Pekar fans will enjoy this minor work from a major figure.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-49941-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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