Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.
A Scottish ghostwriter materializes with a florid, aphoristic, generous account of her nearly 15-year association with Quartet Books in England.
Erdal’s poignant and even-spirited memoir tells of the “finely balanced symbiosis” she achieved from 1981, when she first met the wealthy Lebanese Naim Attallah—whom she calls Tiger—to 1998, when their marriage-like partnership finally dissolved. Originally from Fife, Erdal, a mother with two children, traveled to London to meet Tiger for work on Russian translations, an undertaking that led to their first publishing coup, Red Square. Tiger was a “bird of paradise” with the finest, rarest furnishings and clothes (“Go on, touch!” he cries. “I have only the best”) who employed a bevy of aristocratic young women in his London office. He went to any length to satisfy his considerable vanity (his style was “a lethal combination of charm and chutzpah”), and Erdal became his amanuensis. She ghostwrote everything from Tiger’s love letters to his 1,200-page Asking Questions (a series of interviews with famous women), two later novels, and a newspaper column. Her double life suited her, since she was able to carry out her duties from home in Scotland—except when her marriage broke up. Her descriptions are rich and gently humorous, especially the details about her childhood in Fife and about working holidays writing Tiger’s novels at his Dordogne country house, where she witnessed the grisly ritual of raw meat being fed to his beloved, murderous Doberman guard dogs. The nuts and bolts of the publishing enterprise are the least interesting; the extended extracts from the writers’ collaborated sex scenes are also fairly tedious. Erdal’s revelations about her Napoleonic boss refrain from nastiness, yet her coyness in refusing to name names (still!) even her new husband’s name—seems like a childish disguise. Indeed, the reader has to wonder what possessed this intelligent, gifted writer to collude in her selflessness all those years.
Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51426-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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