by Joshua Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2007
An important and impassioned document of unimaginable tragedy—also a difficult and rather joyless read, but that’s probably...
A man who stayed for the storm, and what he saw after.
Clark, a journalist and the founder of Light of New Orleans Publishing, defied the compulsory evacuation of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached his beloved city, and he and a similarly contrarian group of French Quarter residents spent the ensuing weeks in the alternately nightmarish and summer camp-like ruins of the fabled Big Easy, struggling to restore some semblance of order to the chaotic uncertainty that surrounded them. Clark evokes the fear, confusion, despair and perverse exhilaration he and his fellow survivors experienced as they confronted the massive destruction and eerie emptiness left in Katrina’s wake, foraging for food, water and alcohol (lots and lots of alcohol—the daily consumption of these hardies would stun a rhinoceros). Clark recorded conversations with the people he encountered on his travels through his ruined home, and the stories he collects range from the horrific (rapes in refugee shelters, evacuees dying of dehydration stuck on the interstate, people hurling infants from the sewage-swamped Superdome) to the inspirational (many residents displayed heroic selflessness, distributing food, supplies and medical attention to those unable to fend for themselves). After a short period of “school’s out” giddiness, Clark’s reportage acquires a steady undercurrent of rage, directed at, among other things, the government’s tail-chasing, bureaucratically driven failure to take care of its citizens in a timely manner; the bully-boy tactics of some of the official personnel dispatched to maintain “order” in the devastation; the misinformation and confusion sown by the rapacious national news media; and the short-sighted environmental policies that left New Orleans vulnerable to such calamity in the first place. Powerful stuff, but the narrative becomes repetitive and somewhat numbing. Also, Clark has a predilection for pseudo-Kerouacian flights of poetic fancy, and his heavily dwelt-upon girlfriend troubles, which are undoubtedly important to him, but that pall in the face of profound destruction and loss.
An important and impassioned document of unimaginable tragedy—also a difficult and rather joyless read, but that’s probably appropriate.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3763-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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