Norman Mailer might well place Ockham's adage above his desk: "Entities are not to be multiplied unless necessary." For in his latest collection of journalistic pieces "written in the years of the plague," and of "poems called short hairs," there is little which is not ultimately repetitive, fustian, muddy. Johnson, the Kennedys, Vietnam, Lindsay, Mary McCarthy, Hemingway, even the celebrated Republican Convention coverage printed in Esquire—each essay has its brilliant moments, each is pulverized in a carnage of highbrow cliches, ringside rhetoric, the indulgence of an invincible ego. Lodge "looked like they had been beating him in the kidneys with his own liver." "Goldwater had all the homely assurance of a filthy sock." In these strained pages we are admonished that "we live in a time which has created the art of the absurd." Mailer riffles every contemporary nerve, from psychic ills and existential dread to the obligatory apocalyptic vision, the release of limitless emotional possibilities. Orating on Mount Pisgah, Mailer comes to us as rebel, prophet, conscience of the age, "gentleman gangster." But more than the self-inflation, it is the self-befuddlement which is so truly saddening. The tastlessness of the verse ("One cannot give a funeral service to the fart/and yet there are broken winds which walk the plank in pride") rivals the imaginary interviews, Mailer's dialogue with his mirror, rubbish about mood (in the Heideggerian sense) or about the philosophic aspect of ingestion and elimination. The wisest, strongest comments are on literary matters; alas, they seem marginal to Mailer's concerns. His response to life is increasingly theatrical. Humorlessly striving for a mystic orgy, wasting a huge talent, Mailer reads like some middle-aged volcano spewing burning issues for the young.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1966
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1966
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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