An unfocused memoir that romanticizes the business world of the ’60s, at the expense of personal insight.
Antil’s (The Pompey Hollow Book Club, 2011, etc.) debut memoir tells of his charting a path as a young man in advertising and marketing in 1960s America.
When readers first meet Antil, he’s a college basketball player on scholarship at Xavier University in 1959. After a difficult breakup and a troubling spat with his basketball coach, Antil decides to go down his own path, and his persistence and nerve serve him well as he becomes increasingly successful in advertising and marketing. Though the memoir provides readers with some salient details of a bygone era, from the trivialities of outdated office technology to more serious reflections on the Jim Crow South, the past tends to be seen through rose-tinted glasses. A sense of hokey nostalgia pervades the book, both historically and personally, and most of the supporting characters are cast in a fond, even hagiographic light. Antil’s professional successes are presented so cheerfully that it’s hard to worry about anything turning out less than swell. The difficult, penetrative self-reflection present in the best memoirs is disappointingly absent here, and the structure of the book reflects this problem: Instead of focusing on any one event or theme to provide his story with a central conflict and overarching direction, Antil has written a comprehensive history of 14 years of his life. Amid the abundance of detail and frequently overwrought prose, as well as black-and-white photos and newspaper clippings from the era, certain stronger anecdotes lose their punch when surrounded by so much chaff.
An unfocused memoir that romanticizes the business world of the ’60s, at the expense of personal insight.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
