The occasional outburst of adult themes notwithstanding, this makes good reading not just for Conroy’s fans, but also...
In which the beloved American novelist Conroy (1945-2016) speaks from beyond the grave, sometimes in the saltiest of language.
For close to 200 hours, biographer and novelist Clark (The Headmaster’s Darlings, 2015, etc.) turned on the tape recorder and let it roll in the presence of the loquacious Conroy, who obliged, providing a wealth of observations, anecdotes, shaggy dog stories, and complaints. The last are not many, but like many writers, Conroy keeps a running score of injuries, insults, and bad press. Though he professes not to read his reviews, we all know better than that; in any event, he tells a pleasing tale of running into Gail Godwin, who “gave me a horrible review for The Prince of Tides in the New York Times,” and laughing off the encounter as a well-earned scar, to which he adds that he’s not one of those to be scared off by the opinions of others, even if other voices have been stilled by timidity. The passages on military school and growing up in the service are especially revelatory. In one of the wisest of his remarks, Conroy ventures that “much of what we do in life is repair work on our childhood.” Certainly, that was the case in his breakthrough novel The Great Santini and, to a lesser extent, in books such as The Lords of Discipline, the latter of which, he recounts, caused Gore Vidal to remark that it “could have been a good book if only I’d known that all those guys were gay.” Conroy is unguarded and refreshingly open on many matters of the flesh, as when he remarks that going to Catholic school “fucked up everything connected with my dick and my brain.”
The occasional outburst of adult themes notwithstanding, this makes good reading not just for Conroy’s fans, but also teenagers seeking a literary path out of the confusion as well as grown-ups reckoning with their own lives.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61117-907-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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