axed. (Radio satellite tour; author tour)
A spotty, curmudgeonly, generally funny satire of the virtues of political correctness.
Queenan, the mean-spirited journalist, contributing editor (GQ, Movieline) and author (Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, p. 1940, etc.), ventures outside pop culture to apply his misanthropy to philanthropists. As a blue-collar Catholic who admired the "in your face" martyrs laughing at pagans who flayed their mere flesh, Queenan now pretends he'd like to join contemporary saints and Cadillac liberals like Paul Newman, Jimmy Carter, Tom of Maine, Susan Sarandon, and Robin Williams. Among the "cultural vermin" extolled for their well-publicized efforts on behalf of noble causes, Queenan links Kim Basinger with Gandhi and Sting with Jesus. In joining their ranks, he forswears years of the Samurai criticism that has supplied him with categories like "Unusually Vicious Ad Hominem Attacks," featuring "Raisa Gorbachev (bad dresser), Jesse Kornbluth (idiot), assorted Business Week writers (creeps/idiots), Pete Peterson (phony), David Crosby (idiot)." The easier part of his moral rehab involves consuming Rainforest Crunch ice cream, shade-grown coffee, and St. John's wort tortilla chips. To perform a random act of kindness, Queenan turns to more familiar food, mocking aid programs by supplying protesters with cannoli. Attending a "Millions for Mumia" rally on behalf of an alleged cop-killer, he finds that socialists, Native Americans, lesbians, and "even the vegans had pile-driven their way into this protest." The right-wing conservative in recovery admits he feels as out of place as Mumia might at a Fraternal Order of Police convention, but recovers in time to expose the economics and egocentrics of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, alternative medicine, Eastern spirituality, animal rightists, and "granola heads." Howard Stern fans will enjoy Queenan's hilarious digs at the counterculture's claims of higher moral ground. You don’t have to be a treehugger, though, to feel that acres of virgin forest could have been saved if many flat, overlong jokes here had been
axed. (Radio satellite tour; author tour)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6553-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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