by Judith Matloff ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 2008
A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.
Fearless foreign correspondent buys a fixer-upper in a different kind of war zone: West Harlem.
For two decades, Matloff (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; Fragments of a Forgotten War, 1997) was a restlessly globetrotting, danger-hunting reporter. In April 2000, she decided to put down roots. With her Dutch husband John, also a roving writer, she purchased a once-beautiful building between Broadway and Amsterdam in the West 140s in Manhattan. Matloff says that the neighborhood seemed even less safe than when she visited her first boyfriend there back in the crime-plagued late-’70s. Her street was an open-air drug market. The manic crack addict squatting next door continually threatened her, claiming that the house was actually his. The dozens of nearby “nail salons” and “shoe stores” were actually money-laundering fronts for cash being sent back home; most of the neighborhood came from the same village in the Dominican Republic. Blessed with a knack for making friends (the years on assignment in Latin America helped, too), the author was quickly on good terms with a grumpy caretaker and a refined, Latin-quoting addict; she even struck a deal with the drug crew’s boss to keep his guys off her property. She and John supervised an ill-assorted gang of renovators: The Mexican mocked the Honduran who in turn derided the Dominicans. Matloff, raised in a liberal Jewish family, was almost as surprised by their unembarrassed battling along ethnic lines as she was by the animosity black neighborhood activists displayed toward the local Dominicans. The author avoids nonfiction chick-lit cliché, even when describing such milestones as 9/11 or her pregnancy; her journalistic curiosity and lightly self-deprecating touch keep the book from becoming an uptown safari for the Elle Decor set. She rarely focuses on herself or even the house, but rather on her thrilling, problem-plagued neighborhood, colorfully portrayed in terms that are neither frightened nor naïve.
A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.Pub Date: June 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6526-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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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