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DANCING WITH STRANGERS

A MEMOIR

A former editor at the New York Times Book Review and the author of a well-received history of African-American humor (On the Real Side, 1994), Watkins here recalls his 1950s coming-of-age as a black youth in Youngstown, Ohio, and a student at mostly white Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. With measured and painstaking attention, Watkins details his thoughts and feelings, and people he knew, in his early life, examining the choices he made and his dawning consciousness of race. Reading the French existentialists in high school, he found himself ``suddenly immersed in ideas that seemed to support my own nagging suspicions about the absurdity of the social arrangement.'' At fraternity-dominated Colgate, far from home and friends, Watkins, though a basketball standout, was clearly an outsider. His story slows as he recounts weekend visits to Harlem and his interactions with coeds, black and white, at frat-house parties, but the details build to successful effect when Watkins, intrigued by James Baldwin's ``subtle, nuanced analysis'' of America's race problem, finds epiphany in that writer's still radical argument that race is a state of mind. His mother's own mixed background having shown the author that in America black blood is widely mingled with white, he determines to abandon the concept of race— to ignore others' assumptions about him as a black man and to renounce his own complicity in reinforcing those assumptions. The book's final page telescopes his later career in literary New York. Rich material, one might anticipate, for a subsequent memoir. Watkins sometimes traverses familiar territory about race, but with insight and telling detail—his description, for example, of the exhilaration of hurtling at high speed toward New York City while listening for the first time to Coltrane's newly released version of ``My Favorite Things'' (1960)—he manages to claim the era, and his identity, as his own.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-684-80864-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997

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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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