An uncritical biography of the new US senator from Colorado, the only Native American serving in Congress. Viola, former director of the National Anthropological Archives, is content to relay the facts of Campbell's life—an approach that, in this case, makes for a fairly engrossing story. Born into poverty, of Portuguese and Cheyenne stock, Campbell spent his youth hopping trains, stealing cars, and scraping the bottom of the grade heap at school. His life did an about-face when he discovered judo. The sport became an obsession—the first of many instances in which Campbell bent his will unceasingly toward a goal—leading him to four years of study in Japan, a gold medal at the Pan Am Games, and a spot on the 1964 Olympic team. Apparently he absorbed judo technique but not its teaching about restraint, for his spare time was spent on fast cars, fast women, and frightening outbursts of violence (Viola describes one instance in which Campbell ``proceeded to give his student a lesson in manners before tossing him—bleeding, vomiting, and semi-conscious—onto the rain-soaked driveway''). He worked as a policeman, industrial- arts teacher, and horse rancher before his life took another unpredictable turn, this time into jewelry-making, a field in which he's still famous as Ben Nighthorse, one of the top designers in America. Yet another dramatic shift came in 1980, when he passed time between plane flights by wandering into a local political meeting. Soon he was a Colorado state senator and then a US congressman, carving out a middle-of-the road course and a reputation as a defender of Indian rights. Viola neither lionizes nor challenges Campbell's machismo—and this moral neutrality makes for a curiously old-fashioned biography, informative but ultimately unsatisfying. (Forty b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59652-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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