Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact that wouldn’t work as well standing alone.
A sequel to The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008), the author’s previous collection of sharp-eyed memorials.
Though Winik (MFA Program/Univ. of Baltimore; Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living, 2013, etc.) is most widely regarded as a humorist, through her columns and NPR commentary, death has been a focus of her book projects since First Comes Love (1996). As she observes in the introduction to her latest, “death is the subtext of life, there is no way around it. It is the foundation of life’s meaning and value.” The author also explains that her volumes reflect chronology rather than geography; despite the title, these aren’t Baltimore’s deaths but rather deaths that have occurred since she moved to Baltimore from Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, in 2009. So there’s plenty about her New Jersey girlhood, beginning with the opening piece on her mother and proceeding through the deaths of family members and her mother’s friends. Then she moves on to her pivotal years in Texas, where she found her voice and professional identity in Austin. Winik also commemorates people she didn’t know personally but whose deaths affected her and the culture deeply, including David Bowie and Lou Reed. In writing about these dozens of deaths, the author is writing about life in general, how quickly it can change and how long a memory can persist, and her life in particular, “how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction.” Some die without warning, as Winik writes of an unnamed friend (almost all of those who inspired these pieces go unnamed), “he was fifty-six, just like my own father who died the same way: the heart in the dark of the night that loses its way.” The famous and the anonymous, the scandalous and the respectable: All get their due. For all of the variety in details and circumstance, all of the stories proceed to the same ending.
Insightful pieces with a cumulative impact that wouldn’t work as well standing alone.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-121-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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