Pure pleasure.
In the third installment of his autobiography, the ex-barrister Mortimer (The Sound of Trumpets, 1999, etc.) focuses on a year spent as a scriptwriter for hire, fundraiser for the Royal Court Theater, advocate for penal reform, and crippled, nearly blind old liberal staggering around Tony Blair’s new Britain.
In a more literate time—the 18th century, say, or the 1970s—this brief, witty memoir of an English man of letters suffering the beginning of what is shaping up to be a rather unpleasant old age might not seem quite so extraordinary. Today, however, it seems like a rare and possibly exceptional work. Mortimer begins with practical advice for his fellow screenwriters: “Writing film scripts is like sending soldiers over the top in the First World War. Very few of them come back alive.” From there it’s on to bigger and better things. There are numerous celebrity cameos. The elderly Italian director Franco Zeffirelli reflects pensively on his inability to distract himself with sex the night before a troublesome script meeting. The novelist Muriel Spark is charming and morbid. The baby-boom generation is represented by a pair of identical twins from Birmingham, now married to members of the rock group Deep Purple, who dabble in alternative medicine. Generation-X leftists appear and the author is a bit taken aback to discover they are less interested in such old-school progressive concerns as poverty and civil liberties than in protesting fox-hunting and explaining at length why leather seats are inherently sexist. Mortimer is no easier on himself, adamantly rejecting the idea that old age brings with it wisdom: “Some of the worst misdeeds, follies and crimes of mankind are committed by irresponsible old men. The experience of old age is that, in a body maimed and incapacitated by time, you feel much as you did when you were eleven.”
Pure pleasure.Pub Date: June 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89986-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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 2025 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.
