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MANHATTAN, WHEN I WAS YOUNG

This pleasant memoir of the 1950s and '60s is an ode to Manhattan's unique brand of chaotic energy, by one of the island's adopted daughters. Manhattan was the Emerald City for Cantwell, who told of her New Hampshire childhood in An American Girl (1992). Cantwell is a committed denizen of Greenwich Village (``not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it'') from the moment she arrives as a hope-filled graduate of Connecticut College. Her series of Village residences form the framework for this quiet, occasionally humorous, occasionally painful tale, the objective correlative of her passing from single aspiring writer to young married, mother, and divorced career woman (she is now an editorial board member of the New York Times). Cantwell is remarkably tolerant of her youthful selfher New York pretensions, her social anxietiesand even of her husband, a high-flying literary agent who left her (with two children) for his secretary. Cantwell's joysthe pleasure she takes in turning out fashion copy for Mademoiselle, meeting Alice B. Toklas in Paris with her husbandare laced with unhappinessthe inability to form an identity apart from her husband, her suicidal madness after the birth of her first daughter. With admirable restraint, Cantwell spares us the endless emotional navel-gazing (and feminist cant) that often afflicts such memoirs of self-discovery (or self-invention). At the same time, however, it deprives her tale of juice. Her colleagues at Mademoiselle and later Vogue are mere sketches; and she seems to accept unquestioningly the apparently sudden and full resolution of various emotional difficulties (e.g., her profound discomfort with sex disappears once she discovers ``what it is for,'' i.e., making babies). One longs to know what her warm, patient psychiatrist, Dr. Franklin, thought of these episodes. Still, Cantwell's lovely prose and passions for Manhattan, motherhood, and work will resonate for many women.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1995

ISBN: 0-395-74441-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995

Categories:
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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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