Fluidity and economy of style, a wit that crackles as it whispers. Every reader should experience Lewis.
In this last book before his death in 2003, Lewis amply demonstrates why peers and contemporaries hailed him as one of the finest travel writers in English in the last century.
In this story, Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene visit Spain from England in order to travel to Seville to view the tomb of the Carvaljo family, Spanish ancestors of Lewis’s father-in-law, Ernesto (a “Sicilian man of honor”), and report on its condition. It is, as were most of Lewis’s 14 other nonfiction works, a travel story; in this case one by a 93-year-old writer recalling situations and events that occurred in 1934. Given that, the imagery from a country on the verge of civil war and of its own holocaust stands out as sharply as in a Robert Capa photograph. It’s not just that the author’s cogent observations are perfectly preserved, but also that he has so keen a sense of the dimensions of a culture that’s deep enough to withstand the misery of senseless war heaped upon what was for many contemporary Spaniards the misery of everyday life. Eugene and Lewis literally stroll through a nascent revolution—scheduled trains are not running; buses pocked with bullet holes may or may not hold to their routes. The only way to cross the street in Madrid without immediately becoming a sniper’s target, they quickly learn, is to walk like hordes of other pedestrians with arms fully extended into the air. A necessary 60-mile hike to Zaragoza to pick up ad hoc transport to Seville takes them through stark villages of cave dwellers, as well as mysteriously beautiful oak forests. But everywhere, from the bleakest villages to the grandest of ancient cities, there remains an overriding tradition of hospitality and the interchange of philosophies over bread and wine. Revolution or not, the pair press on to view the tomb in Seville.
Fluidity and economy of style, a wit that crackles as it whispers. Every reader should experience Lewis.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1439-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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