Overall, a persuasive argument for reassessing the career of a neglected American writer.
Novelist Leggett, a former director of Iowa’s Workshop, makes a convincing case that Saroyan was more complex and interesting, both as man and as artist, than his current reputation suggests.
When Saroyan died, in 1981, his literary reputation had been on the wane for years. Today, if he’s remembered at all, it’s most likely as the writer of sentimental tales of “little people” suffering through adversity and emerging with their faith in humanity intact. But, as Leggett makes clear, Saroyan was driven as much by anger as by sentiment. Born in Fresno, California, in 1903, the son of Armenian immigrants, he spent five years in an orphanage after his father died and his mother wasn’t able to support him. The memory of these early hardships, combined with the prejudice over his ancestry he was later to encounter in school, instilled in him a lifelong hatred of social injustice, but also a sense of self-reliance that often manifested itself as arrogance and a refusal to listen to anyone’s advice but his own. His early success only cemented his intransigence: he published a bestselling story collection at the age of 26 and a decade later had three plays running on Broadway simultaneously, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Time of Your Life. Later, he won an Academy Award for his screenplay The Human Comedy (which he later adapted into a novel). Unfortunately, these early achievements were soon erased by his own self-destructive behavior. He married and divorced the same woman twice, gambled compulsively, and quarreled with editors, publishers, producers, other writers, and his own children. Leggett’s portrait is sympathetic without being sentimental, and he has a novelist's eye for the telling detail. A more thorough discussion of Saroyan’s actual work would have been appreciated, however, as Leggett assumes a familiarity with it that many readers won’t necessarily have.
Overall, a persuasive argument for reassessing the career of a neglected American writer.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41301-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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