Dispatches from the dark side made funny. (photos)
How to turn an obituary into an ironic comic masterpiece.
For the last half of the 1990s, readers of the New York Times could be excused if they searched out Thomas’s work before they bothered with the front-page lead. Known as “McGs.”—after the veteran reporter’s middle name—these little beauties celebrated the unsung, the queer, the unpretentious, the low-rent. His 1995 obituary of Kitty Litter king Edward Lowe first brought the 56-year-old Thomas to public attention, and until his death from cancer in 2000 he paraded an endless sideshow of worthies before his readership. Drollery was his forte, taking someone’s career high note, often incongruous or absurd to begin with, and garnishing it with plenty of wit. Take this fine example of the poetry of compression: “Anton Rosenberg, a storied sometime artist and occasional musician who embodied the Greenwich Village hipster ideal of 1950’s cool to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment that he never amounted to much of anything, died on Feb. 14.” Thomas had a knack for extolling and leveling in a breath; he tagged defunct duckpins queen Toots Barger as “a perennial world champion in a decidedly regional sport.” And he could massage a piece of farce with deadpan certainty: “You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down among goats and smells like a goat,” he wrote in 1998, “and it won’t be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man.” The cornerstone of his interests could be summed up in a line from his obituary of Angelo Zuccotti, who wielded the velvet rope at El Morocco: “He may have been a working stiff . . . but he also saw his work as an art.”
Dispatches from the dark side made funny. (photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1562-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
