As a travel writer, Liebermann is a work in progress, but the talent is there, needing only to be honed and refined.
A Jerusalem-based CNN correspondent’s memoir of round-the-world travel with a near-fatal disease.
In 2013, Liebermann and his wife left their jobs, determined to circumnavigate the globe on the cheap. The itinerary included Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Just shy of 30 and after only six years in broadcast news, declaring that “in making a living, I had failed to make a life” seems a little premature, even melodramatic. Alas, melodrama often overtakes the narrative and the narrator, whose overworked tear ducts seem a form of artistic expression. Apart from some harrowing close calls with diabetes, especially in Nepal, Liebermann tends to overstate his day-to-day accounts of dealing with his disease and roughing it on the road. The book harbors flashes of close observation and inspired description—e.g., his depictions of the Laotian people, his thoughts while camped (illegally) on the Great Wall of China, his account of the death of an anonymous man in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, these moments of inspiration are only intermittent, and the rest of the book suffers by comparison. For all his adventurousness and determination, Liebermann betrays a penchant for hasty judgments, weak generalizations, and trite pronouncements. When not detailing his duel with diabetes, which will resonate chiefly with other diabetics, he delivers a breezy series of snapshots and vignettes—engaging as far as they go but hardly the stuff of a memorable travelogue. Just because an insight is new to him does not mean it is of fresh coinage to readers, and Liebermann has a tendency to express a familiar observation as if it is being made for the first time. But it is a young man's book, a young traveler's book, and perhaps one should make allowances.
As a travel writer, Liebermann is a work in progress, but the talent is there, needing only to be honed and refined.Pub Date: May 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1848-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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