Some say that everybody has a book in them, and this author has found his in this memorable, often grim work.
Ambulance work is not for the squeamish, and neither is reading about it.
In the late 1960s, Scardino worked on a New York hospital’s ambulance crew in order to pay for his college tuition. He started on the pre-med track, but by the end of his ambulance job, he had no interest in becoming a doctor. “The truth is, I don’t want to be around the injured, sick and dying any more than I can help it,” he writes. It’s easy to see why the job soured his stomach for medicine. In one gruesome passage, he describes a body barely recognizable as such: “Where his hair ought to have been, there appeared to be long gray and white filaments of mold. Instead of a face, there was a flat, oval plane covered with maggots. No sign of a nose. Just one wet, gray surface with its seething, ivory-colored veneer of larvae.” Readers may wonder if Scardino took detailed notes or wrote the entire book decades ago. The latter seems doubtful; it doesn’t seem likely that an admittedly poor student would have had such command over his material as a teenager and then decide to let it sit for decades. Perhaps he told these vivid stories often enough that somebody persuaded him that there was a book in them and he re-created the stories from memory. The author claims that he could never forget them, and readers will have trouble doing so as well. There’s a baby thrown from a window, a drug overdose, morbidly obese people who had to be maneuvered out of apartments and into ambulances, and one crashed-and-burned airplane. Scardino, who has since pursued a career in advertising, emerges as a different person at the end of these experiences than he was when he began the work. “Something in me had changed, not for the better, but surely forever,” he writes.
Some say that everybody has a book in them, and this author has found his in this memorable, often grim work.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-46961-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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