Little more than a young man’s journal, chronicling years of personal hopes, troubles, and obligations.
A mélange of journal entries, songs, and poems form the basis of this memoir of bohemian adolescence.
Reagan’s debut begins by describing his typical adolescent sense of bewilderment, but unlike most searching for meaning, he travels to Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam (among other destinations) to find it. Out there, he slurps noodles with his “lost apostles” and strums his guitar on the beach while Hindu pujas proceed in the background. His arrival in New York follows heartbreak; a journal entry describes him driving to his ex’s in Colorado to drop off a bag of her stuff, hoping for a final catharsis but finding her absent. He composes a note amidst a mosquito swarm, hoping the sentimental objects in the bag will work like so many daggers to the heart. In New York, he struggles to plan paintings for friends and family; they often appear on lists of obligations, but rarely as anything but names. Unexplained references to personal details occur regularly; characters often materialize for a page only to disappear for the rest of the book. Reagan also struggles with the city itself, and especially the vapid, drug-fueled, bohemian lifestyle of New York artists he meets. Interspersed between these journal entries are dozens of free-verse songs and poems, with subjects ranging from hangovers to global consciousness. Many of the poems appear to be raw drafts, and their wide-eyed vivacity sometimes degenerates into clichéd platitudes: “Our apple is bad / The world’s not in our eye.” Reagan struggles with finances, selling his work, and relationships, but his globe-trotting and Brooklynite lifestyle make his complaints often read as whining. For instance, he rants about his band mate’s stubbornness, despite later admitting that he’s been slacking, too. Some entries’ rambling style might appeal to youthful traveler types: “Bob Dylan’s your god and his good old friends and you want his life and you’re not giving in you’ll get it soon, it’ll be yours soon, everything that you ever dreamed.” But the references to Reagan’s inscrutable history, to-do lists, and melodramatic diary entries are too personal and too unpolished to allow this collection to transcend its source material.
Little more than a young man’s journal, chronicling years of personal hopes, troubles, and obligations.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2015
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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