The truth about American history’s most accomplished mythmaker turns out to be stranger than his many fictions.
A lively reconstruction of what really happened in William Cody’s life.
Cody was the most famous American of his day, and people around the world knew his story: He was a noble savage of the frontier, left to fend for himself at an early age, became the youngest Pony Express rider in history, fought Indians with wild abandon and, as he put it, “stood between savagery and civilization most all of my early days.” He also created the renowned Wild West Show, which spent three decades thrilling audiences with sketches of frontier derring-do that were as elaborately staged as any movie spectacular; his cast included many vanquished Indians whose names are celebrated today. As Warren (History/Univ. of California, Davis) painstakingly points out, there were many Buffalo Bills on the 19th-century frontier, and Cody seems to have borrowed from all of them; he may well have ridden for the Pony Express, for instance, but the adventures Cody reported in his unreliable memoir were unlikely in the extreme, such as convincing the famed Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face not to kill him. (The alleged encounter, Warren notes, took place in howling winter far from Sioux territory; the Sioux, sensibly, did not like to travel in such inclement weather, and a renowned leader would likely not have participated in such a mission had it ever existed.) Warren recalls Cody’s career as a young partisan in the Civil War to the details of his scandalous divorce from his long-suffering wife and his many failures as a businessman—but also many virtues as a human being, despite his habit of stretching the truth; the wonder of the entertainment empire he created; and even his role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The truth about American history’s most accomplished mythmaker turns out to be stranger than his many fictions.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41216-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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