A mixed bag but overall a well-written and thought-through exercise in remembrance.
A fan’s notes on forming a friendship with a favorite author, mixed with other reminiscences of life and loss.
Now in his early 60s, Garcia (Without a Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans, 2017, etc.) entered a Chicagoland teendom with a fascination with Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron of World War I fame, who died at the age of 25 while looking to add to his count of 80-plus Allied planes shot down. The author came by that fascination by accident, having chanced on a biography in a bookstore. “By the time I put the book down,” he writes, “I’d come to realize that Richthofen was once a boy like me who also had a desire for adventure.” Garcia’s own adventures, while less lethal, took him early into the land of Richthofen scholarship, beginning with the author of that biography, Dale Titler, to whom Garcia wrote a fan letter, opening a sporadic, decadeslong correspondence and finally a meeting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “For now,” he writes, “they contemplate each other a moment longer…past and present merging into the now middle-aged man he holds against him, no longer a boy although he can’t help but think of him as that driven youngster….” In the essays where Titler appears, Garcia has a fine foil. Other autobiographical pieces in this set of connected essays are less focused, though some have the grit and bite of a good noir novel: “About a year after Bill stabbed Johnny in the neck,” opens one, “Randy began drinking again.” There’s a whole tragedy built into those few words, as with other scattered moments: “A blind woman I know told me that with each passing day it gets harder and harder for her to remember what it was like to see.”
A mixed bag but overall a well-written and thought-through exercise in remembrance.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62872-869-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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