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TATTOO FOR A SLAVE

Name: TATTOO FOR A SLAVE
Author: Hortense Calisher
ISBN: 0-15-101096-X

by Hortense Calisher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2004

A masterpiece of memoir: a volume that soars, sings, and sobs.

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A dazzling memoir by the nonagenarian novelist who discovers along the way a most damning document among her family’s papers.

It takes more than 260 pages for Calisher (Sunday Jews, 2002, etc.) to tell us the details of this document—a receipt for an 1856 life-insurance policy, bought in Richmond, Virginia, by her grandfather for two of his “servants” (i.e., slaves). The author, devastated by the discovery (“I am hangdog, ebullience gone,” she writes), ends this wonderful, lyrical account with a tattoo—a bugle summons, thrice uttered: “Remember the slave.” What leads us to this tattoo is some of the most lovely language imaginable—Emersonian in its richness, Nabokovian in its evocativeness. She begins the first of her several major sections—unnumbered, unnamed—with a memory of her father telling her that her grandmother had never kept slaves. (Later, Calisher says she believes her father wanted her to find the document.) And then she begins her journey into the tangled wood of her family’s history. She remembers the German and broken English she heard in childhood (her Jewish grandfather had arrived from Germany around 1827), and many of the early pages are spiced with German words and phrases (usually translated). She gradually moves along history’s pathways, diverging here and there, returning always to the main road. When she nears painful moments (an estrangement from her brother), she temporizes, waits. But who cares? For on nearly every page of this journey is a sentence you wish you’d written (e.g., “But humility is a prism, all of whose sides a child is not yet equipped to see”). She alludes only occasionally to her adult history—to two marriages, the birth of a child, a writing career. What matters here—what really matters here—is that complex web of family; and she discovers in its intricate silkiness a small but purely poisonous spider.

A masterpiece of memoir: a volume that soars, sings, and sobs.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-15-101096-X

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | JEWISH | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
SUNDAY JEWS
by Hortense Calisher

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NOVELLAS OF HORTENSE CALISHER
by Hortense Calisher

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE SLAMMER WITH CAROL SMITH
by Hortense Calisher

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)