Yet another volume about Thoreau on the centennial anniversary of his death brings us a firm, well-fixed portrait of the man. The profile reveals Thoreau at all periods of his life, in his life, in his home-setting and the infrequent sallies forth from his beloved Concord (to Harvard to get his education, to Staten Island to teach, to Fire Island to seek Margaret Fuller Ossoli's body, to the Maine Woods and Cape Cod and finally in a vain effort to improve his health to the Minnesota woods). The words chosen are his own ("Says I to Myself", his journal, provides insight on writing and nature; excerpts from Walden and "The Last Days of John Brown" show his mature style and social outlook) and those of famed contemporaries (Josiah Quincy remarked on his seeming indifference at Harvard, George Eliot retrospectively reviewed Walden, Emerson said at his grave "He had a beautiful soul"). The pitch of intellectual life at Concord, singular in time and place when Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Channing intermingled — and the timbre of Thoreau's incorruptible individualism whether as student, teacher, lecturer, surveyor, traveller, writer — come through clearly. A chronology of life, works, list of mss. collections and for the tourist four tours through Concord conclude a book less exciting and provocative than The Thoughts of Thoreau (p. 955, 1962) but for its historical neatness a solid contribution.
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1962
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: T.Y. Crowell
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1962
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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