A rootin’-tootin’ biography of a Nevada cowpoke. Call it the Horse Whisperer Syndrome: cowboys are in these days, and the more authentic the better. Lige Langston fits the bill; the scion of a Nevada ranching family, he’s ridden the hardpan desert since 1908, and he has tales to tell on matters ranging from childhood schoolmarms (“My first teacher was Miss Barber and gee, she was swell”) to gypsum mining (“I got a job runnin’ the jackhammer. Two of us. A little Eye-talian guy. Vince, and me”) to breaking horses (“Her and me ended up cuttin’ his rope right in two, about six inches from the hondo”). Hussa, a California poet and rancher, has collected Langston’s yarns in this patchwork volume, made up of her own biographical interpolations, other Nevada ranchers’ memoirs of Langston, the homespun yarns themselves, and photographs, all mingled in a narrative (and typographic) jumble. The effect is sometimes of a family scrapbook, at other times of a postmodern hyperfiction; either way, it’s not the most straightforward reading. Readers willing to brave the text will learn a thing or two about the cowboy life, and especially about how hard, dangerous, lonely, unlucrative, and unromantic the whole enterprise of livestock tending is; Langston’s whisky-lubed tales are full of treacherous farm machinery, horses, and fellow wranglers. Those readers will also pick up a good store of cowboy vernacular (in which lambs are “little toe-dancers” and skittish horses are “goosey buggers”) and a feel for the high-lonesome” the Nevada desert, America’s outback. Readers of Max Brand and Louis L’Amour will thrill to this book, and students of Western folklore and literature will find much of interest here as well. (For the tale of a contemporary cowboy, see David McCumber, The Cowboy Way, p. 123)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8061-3109-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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