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A DISTANT PROSPECT

In this sequel to First Childhood (see p. 1246), Lord Berners looks back on his years at Eton with enough distance to forgive the indignities and recall the terrors with honesty and humor. He begins and ends by exploring the twin adolescent mysteries of sex and schooling, as if therein lay the key to the world. Given Lord Berners’s later life, as chronicled in Mark Amory’s Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric (1998), his time at Eton contains all the richness of a chrysalis—and then some. According to Berners, he owes to his few interrupted school years his full adult awakening. And so, in this slim volume, he charts his boyhood trials in one of England’s most exalted institutions, attacking the cruel insensitivity of his teachers and his rejection by peers for being what society deemed as a disaster—an aesthete, incompetent at sports, obsessed with boys, and enchanted by Wagner. Yet out of his struggle, Berners discovered that intellect can “flash and sparkle and agreeably illuminate.” To this realization he clung (and clings) with brio. He longs for the transcendent brilliance of Marston, a friend whose social standing his family would never accept, and later for the classic beauty and style of Deniston. He is generous in his descriptions of tutors and icons of his social class. And as his blind devotion to his mother subsides, he revels freely in opera and succumbs to reveries about the way women dress. (Meanwhile, the rest of the boys scuttle off to the smoking room to review the day’s events in sport.) Lord Berners is clearly seduced by artistic luxury and enchanted by title. Yet when at last he leaves Eton, he’s no longer the shy boy bettered by girls on horseback. He’s is a master of subtlety, a snake charmer who never lets us peer into the troubling depths of his basket. The two volumes of memoir are marvelous together.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1998

ISBN: 1-885983-32-8

Page Count: 186

Publisher: Turtle Point

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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