Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.
A lyrical memoir of country life, and a requiem, of sorts, for one of the last best places.
Story-writer Rember (English/Albertson Coll.; Cheerleaders from Gomorrah, 1994, etc.) opens his narrative with an invitingly well-handled anecdote from his youth involving a chance encounter with Ernest Hemingway on a snowy Idaho lane. It ends sadly, as indeed did Hemingway’s life, but also with a matter-of-fact simplicity that perfectly fits its rural setting: tragic though it may be, life goes on, and so do our stories. Now in his early 50s, Rember weaves past and present, dropping in here to recall his trapper/fishing-guide father’s efforts to carve a living out of wilderness, there to ponder what became of that wilderness once the word got out to Hollywood that the skiing there was good and the people compliant; among the sometimes spectral characters who figure in his pages are a dissatisfied banker friend who is forever trying to convert Rember to the cause of making money; another friend who, having suffered a brain injury in a climbing accident, slowly rebuilds his memories and skills; and a student with a “not-very-good brain” who, before Rember’s eyes, ruins a car that cost well more than he earns in a year. From these and other figures fine and flawed, Rember draws moral lessons rendered in nicely epigrammatic, often humorous turns: “I had learned that the magic can fall out of things and that you can be involved in rites of passage that turn out to be all about somebody else.” “Bliss, Idaho, is just like Saudi Arabia. . . . Except in Bliss, the wind blows harder and the people aren’t any fun.”
Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42207-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
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