A frustrating read that promises more than it delivers.
In this study of Swedish crime-writing sensation Stieg Larsson (1954–2004), journalist Pettersson, who published Larsson’s first book in 2001 (not part of the Millenium Trilogy) opens with the claim that it is “not a biography in the conventional sense.”
Rather, it is a work that explores the writer's “public persona” in tandem with “the interplay between [Larsson’s] life and work and society at large.” True to his word, Petterson is restrained regarding the details about Larsson’s background, motivations and personal relationships. He begins with a cursory sketch of the writer’s beginnings in northern Sweden: his rural upbringing, his move to the largest city in the northern provinces and his early attraction to writing and left-wing political causes. From this point, Larsson’s work against the political predations of the Swedish extreme right rooted in neo-Nazi fascism and committed to “ethnic homogeneity and Western values” take center stage. His political activism and journalistic inclinations led him to Stockholm, where he worked as a news graphic illustrator and eventually founded Expo, a magazine dedicated to monitoring and exposing the activities of those affiliated with the extreme right. The story of the future crime-fiction novelist’s fight against neo-Nazism is intriguing, but Pettersson’s treatment of this aspect of the story is inept. In his efforts to explain the history and evolution of the Swedish right, Pettersson often loses the narrative thread about Larsson. Furthermore, he never accomplishes more than suggesting the obvious: that Larsson’s bestselling Millennium Trilogy was born of encounters with ideologies that openly espoused hatred of “the weak, the deviant, the foreign [and] the different.”
A frustrating read that promises more than it delivers.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4027-8940-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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