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DEAR GOD, HAVE YOU EVER GONE HUNGRY?

Name: DEAR GOD, HAVE YOU EVER GONE HUNGRY?
Author: Joseph Bau
ISBN: 1-55970-431-4

by Joseph Bau ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1998

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A Schindler Jew’s mediocre Holocaust memoir, buoyed by its generous humor and often fetching illustrations. As Holocaust memoirs go, Bau’s isn—t remarkably full of depravity, heroism, or miraculous escapes. Instead, for much of the memoir’s first half, the teenaged protagonist is incarcerated with his family in the ghetto of Krakow. Much of the black humor that pervades this section involves Joseph, as unpaid graphic artist, and his ever-scheming, comic-optimist brother Marcel, who tries to parlay Joseph’s skill into life-giving work permits and even financial rewards from their Nazi overlords. But relentless hunger, as the title suggests, is really the chief theme; the funniest section involves the misadventures that prevent three different sources of food from providing a beggar’s banquet. Still, Bau writes in earnest (and how could he not?): the ghetto is liquidated on March 13, 1943, and some 2,000 Jews are butchered in the process. Accordingly, the authorial eye observes a woman’s hand, protruding from a shallow mass grave, “pointing an accusing finger . . . as if to warn the killers that their hour of reckoning would surely come.” A latrine is then built above the grave. The inhumanity and inanity of the situation give Bau just the right opportunity for his understated wit, which proves to be the key to his survival, offered in resistance to a range of horrific events. He tells of his courtship and marriage to Rebecca Tannenbaum in the camp. Climactically, in the memoir’s final chapter, the now elderly Israeli couple braces as they—re called to testify at the Vienna trial of the Plaszow concentration camp’s killer of Blau’s father. Many of Bau’s 100 or so childish line drawings offer emotive illustration. He includes a few maudlin and inartistic poems that add little to this memoir.

Pub Date: July 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-55970-431-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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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GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)