Despite some genuinely beautiful recollections, this account remains too haphazardly constructed to sustain the reader’s...
After the death of his wife, an author goes on the road and writes an eclectic memoir.
Schwartz (In the Shadow of Babylon, 2011) lost his wife of 41 years to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease. The descent into death was a slow one for Emily and ultimately involved the painful deterioration of her body. When she finally died, the author sold his impressive home nestled within a golf course—the one Emily grew up in—and set out on a kind of therapeutic walking tour, collecting new friends and adventures along the way. One day, he received a book in the mail—it turned out to be a memoir Emily wrote unbeknownst to him—and that remembrance inspired him to pen his own. Schwartz darts quickly back and forth between the remote and more proximate pasts—sometimes he details his family’s ancestry, his previous two marriages, or his travels with Emily through Italy and Japan. His meditations frequently refer to or even revolve around the libidinal pull of sex: his sexual escapades in Asia, his youthful philandering, his fascination with erections, and the peculiar relationship between sexuality and shame. Schwartz also discusses his shiftless youth—he was rescued from a drunken driving arrest at the age of 17 when a compassionate police officer promised to ditch the paperwork if he joined the Air Force (and so he did). The author became a very successful businessman—he was a millionaire by 30—as well as an award-winning writer. As the title suggests, this volume is an untidy mélange of recollections and commentary, so compulsively digressive that it often becomes exhausting. Schwartz becomes focused when he movingly writes of his love for Emily, with the book as a whole a kind of meandering love letter to her. The stories he shares are sometimes hilarious, but the prose overall is manically quip-laden and often remarkably condescending. In one painful scene, he sententiously lectures a priest on the moral failings of religion (“Muslims worldwide and from all walks of life…unequivocally and unapologetically proclaim that Islam instructs them to hate, subjugate, and kill all who resist it”). It’s impossible not to be touched by the author’s tender affection for his wife, but the work as a whole is maddeningly disorganized and smug.
Despite some genuinely beautiful recollections, this account remains too haphazardly constructed to sustain the reader’s attention.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Joss International
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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