Narrow in scope, this homeless tale still offers a testimonial with undeniable value.
A first-person account explores homelessness in Massachusetts.
Lough opens his debut memoir in 2012 as he faced the prospect of living on the streets for the first time at age 53. The author recounts his trials while he navigated the rules and regulations of several shelters. Each one stipulated a different maximum length of residency and minimum period between stays, which added to the sense of revolving doors. Lough comments: “Compared to the six-day time period at Ally’s and two weeks at the Harvard shelter, ninety days at the Brewster seemed like real security.” When he couldn’t afford car repairs, this setback created a dependence on public transportation and severely limited the jobs he could accept. Lough’s frustration with this vicious cycle is palpable, especially when a shared ride to a job site got him into trouble (marijuana usage in the car was the issue, although the author did not partake) and affected his ability to sleep at a particular shelter. During one of the periods between shelters, an abandoned van became a godsend, his only chance to keep relatively warm and dry that night. It was unlocked and unoccupied, contained a mattress, and remained undisturbed until daybreak. Throughout the text, the author also includes bleak images of some of the locations he frequented during this time. After 18 months, Lough’s previously learned skills as a handyman offered him a way out when he found a steady job as an onsite building manager performing maintenance duties. To his credit, the author successfully conveys a precarious existence—at once monotonous and fraught with uncertainty. The only caveat about this gritty work regards the calibration of the reader’s expectations in light of a phrase from Randall Shaw’s Foreword (“an unvarnished look at the culture of homelessness”) and the broad subtitle, both of which could be a bit misleading. It may not be possible to extrapolate Lough’s experiences to other geographic locations or facets of identity such as race (he’s Caucasian), gender, or age. This memoir is a case study with significant details about everyday concerns, not a place for grand sociological theories. This is not to diminish its worth but rather to acknowledge the actual breadth of the project.
Narrow in scope, this homeless tale still offers a testimonial with undeniable value.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8297-2
Page Count: 104
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Show biz biographer Gottfried (All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 1990, etc.) once again condescends to his subject. As usual, Gottfried has done a solid job of researching and crisply retelling the life story of Danny Kaye, born David Kaminski in 1913 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. He capably situates Kaye, who began his career in the Catskills, at ``a historic moment [when] the low clowns of burlesque and the elegant monologuists of vaudeville...were being replaced by the cooler, more remote entertainers of radio and the movies.'' Kaye himself, though he exuded warmth onstage, was, in Gottfried's depiction, emotionally distant in his personal life, and he gained his greatest fame as a carefully nonethnic, childlike performer attuned to the mores of suburban, family-oriented postwar America—though he himself was thoroughly urbane. His stage successes in the early 1940s and such movie vehicles as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and Hans Christian Andersen (1952) never really captured Kaye's unique combination of gifts; Gottfried rightly points to the sophisticated mÇlange of comic songs, soft-shoe dancing, and audience-pleasing patter in his nightclub act, which triumphed at the London Palladium in 1948, as more expressive of his abilities. Not that Gottfried appears to think much of those abilities; he quotes extensively from negative assessments of Kaye's work and is similarly free with bitchy comments from people who knew the entertainer, regaling us endlessly with stories of Kaye's ego, cruelty, and strained marriage with writer Sylvia Fine, depicted as a union of professional convenience. He does take time to convincingly refute Donald Spoto's much-ballyhooed claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier were lovers, but other than that, no gossip is too mean-spirited to repeat. The author seems almost to relish Kaye's sad professional and personal decline before his death in 1987. Comprehensive—except for any spark of human sympathy.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86494-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Can a minor literary figure sustain interest throughout a major biography? In the case of Henry James Sr., the answer is yes. James is the ``blocked and monomaniacal hierophant'' who fathered perhaps America's most remarkable literary brood—Henry, William, and Alice. With equal parts psychological insight and mordant humor, Habegger (English/Univ. of Kansas; Henry James and the ``Woman Business,'' not reviewed) limns a fiercely paradoxical man constantly undermined by inner demons. Henry Sr. (181182) is little read today, but he was an intellectual when it first came to matter during the American Literary Renaissance. An eccentric philosopher, Henry Sr. had wealth and a gift for witty conversation that gave him access to many of the leading literary and intellectual men of his day, including Emerson, Carlyle, Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, yet his bilious essays also mired him in endless controversy. Habegger traces much of his character to a childhood accident that deprived him of a leg and gave him, presumably, much to compensate for. He spent his youth in drunken idleness. He had a devastating nervous breakdown in his 30s and later embraced and then quarreled with one religion or philosophy after another, including Calvinism, Swedenborgism, and Fourierism (his advocacy of the latter's theories on sexual freedom caused a huge scandal). His family relations also bore the marks of the crackpot: He favored William, shuttled Henry Jr. from one school and instructor to another, left his two younger sons exposed to the Civil War service from which William and Henry were shielded, and, regarding women as a mere appendage to men, so smothered Alice's questing intellect that she became suicidal. How ironic that in middle age this egotist came to believe that selfhood was the principle root of evil. This deserves an honored place on the shelves with previous biographies of the James family by Leon Edel, R.W.B. Lewis, and Jean Strouse.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15383-3
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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