A quirky study that intriguingly snapshots a city in time as well as a life.
Hanson (Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War, 2006, etc.) pursues the glamour in New York City’s Lower East Side gangland.
The author can be indulged for his fascination with the teeming criminal underside of turn-of-the-century immigrant New York because his descriptions of the slums, gang warfare, corruption and police raids are contextually rich and wonderfully convincing. Hanson delves into the clutter surrounding the elusive “facts” of Eastman’s life to create a portrait of an evidently intelligent character who had a keen eye for opportunity and possessed a sense of honor. Born in 1873, young Eastman scraped by with a pet store and sold pigeons. His education was gained on the street, first in Brooklyn, then the LES, and he soon became a young tough, lured into the “sum of human misery.” Built like a pugilist, he moved from being a bouncer to dance-hall “sheriff” to racketeer and chief of his own gang, extending in territory from the Bowery to the East River. By the turn of the century, his gang had more than 1,000 members, carving a lucrative protection racket from street vendors, settling labor disputes and acting as repeat voters for the Tammany Hall men. Eventually too many returns to the rogues’ gallery and a stint at Sing Sing inaugurated a period of waning fortunes, rendering his next move shocking. In 1917, just as the United States entered World War I, Eastman enlisted. Though 43, he was in fairly robust physical condition, despite numerous gunshot wounds and scars. Therein follows the bizarre second half of this devoted biography, tracking Eastman’s fierce combat duty in France with the 106th Infantry, made up of working-class Brooklyn boys. Eventually they valiantly penetrated the Hindenburg Line and Eastman distinguished himself in combat.
A quirky study that intriguingly snapshots a city in time as well as a life.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26655-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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