Both a very uneven book and a very welcome one—a paradox Babel would have appreciated.
The tireless Charyn’s 39th book (The Green Lantern, 2004, etc.) is a feisty “biographical meditation” on the truncated career of the great Russian modernist.
Babel (1894–1940) was a Jew who grew up breathing the rich ethnic air of the Moldavanka district of the northern seaport city of Odessa. His efforts to become Russia’s Guy de Maupassant (whose stories Babel revered) were both thwarted and enriched as he was drawn into the orbits of national revolution and global war—as a correspondent and, perhaps (biographical details are unclear), a soldier and Soviet Secret Police officer—and, eventually, declared enemy of the people (once his mentor-protector, writer Maxim Gorky, was imprisoned and executed at Joseph Stalin’s order). Charyn’s approach to this ambivalent, fascinating figure—an artist sensitive to the romantic lure of violence, an unprepossessing physical specimen who collected multiple wives and mistresses—is twofold. He finds the sources of Babel’s fiction in his experiences—for example, Babel’s “attachment” to the legendary First Cavalry (manned by Cossacks renowned for their savagery), magically transposed in his 1926 masterpiece Red Cavalry. But the use of biography is haphazard. Charyn devotes disproportionate space to such ancillary matters as Babel’s supportive critics Victor Shklovsky and Lionel Trilling; memoirist Antonina Pirozhkova (whose At His Side is compared, to its detriment, with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s magisterial Hope Against Hope); and Babel’s surviving daughter Nathalie, editor of his recently published Collected Works. These emphases distract, yet Charyn’s enthusiasm for Babel’s spare, slashing prose and nightmarish intensity register strongly. And it’s never too late to rediscover this great writer’s unique admixture of brutality, peril and paradoxical beauty.
Both a very uneven book and a very welcome one—a paradox Babel would have appreciated.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-64306-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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