A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for...
Hero or opportunist? Rebel or terrorist? Did he even own a coonskin cap? Davy Crockett was an enigma in his own age—and certainly the right man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Retired New York City firefighter Groneman, a veteran of the 9/11 attacks, recognizes that a vast mythmaking enterprise underlay Davy Crockett’s ascent to the status of cultural hero; one series, Davy Crockett’s Almanacs, ran to 45 volumes “of increasingly violent tall tales” and was wildly successful, though, Groneman notes, Crockett made nothing from it. His elevation seems unlikely, for Crockett started off life under a father no more violent or drunk than most fathers on the Appalachian frontier, showed no more aptitude for hard work than any of his peers and commanded no more book-learning than a farmer or freighter or trapper. Still, he distinguished himself by a certain stoical unflappability under fire and good humor, which, witnesses recall, he put to good use during the defense of the Alamo, which sealed his reputation once and for all. The mythmaking, too, was a product of its time, for Crockett happened to come along just when the Founding Fathers were dying off and “the American identity was shifting from the Virginia aristocracy to the common man of the Western frontier.” In this lean an lucid biography, Groneman portrays more of the complicated, haunted David Crockett that Billy Bob Thornton did in the 2004 film The Alamo than did Fess Parker in the 1950s. And as for the coonskin cap—yes, he wore one.
A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for Crockett’s lapses into bad behavior while highlighting his better qualities.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31067-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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