Generally skillful and engagingly detailed, but accenting the carnal more than the spiritual.
A would-be Hemingway traces the spiritual and sexual odyssey of his early years.
Tuccille (Trump, 1985), denounced as a heretic by the dean of a Catholic college, skillfully weaves together details from his Italian-American upbringing in the Bronx with his globetrotting in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The author renounces Catholicism and its educational institutions, “presided over by social misfits, sexual deviants, and intellectual dullards in long, black dresses.” The narrative then adopts a self-deprecating tone, especially when the author recalls his naivete and pretentiousness upon deciding that he is a born writer. A first novel molders on an agent’s desk for years, yet the optimistic author wanders across North America, Australia, Asia and Europe, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, posing as an accomplished artist, getting into his share of fights and, especially, bedding as many women as possible. Tuccille juxtaposes this narrative of his young adulthood with childhood scenes, invariably filled with guilt, anxiety and strife, thanks in large part to his parents’ loveless marriage. This autobiography claims to recount a spiritual quest, yet it has much more to say about matters of the flesh, often related in spicy detail. Tuccille does mention his journey through atheism, agnosticism, Eastern mysticism, the occult and the radical individualism espoused by Ayn Rand. However, except for the author’s thorough explanation of his initial attraction to Rand’s philosophy and his final rejection of it, details concerning sex and booze dominate the account. Throughout, Tuccille eschews the first-person in favor of the second, referring to himself as “you”–perhaps as a way of distancing himself from his past, but the strategy comes off as self-indulgent. Because Tuccille’s style emphasizes telling details and clever turns of phrase, however, the narrative never lags.
Generally skillful and engagingly detailed, but accenting the carnal more than the spiritual.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-38429-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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