A collection of essays with many virtues.
A lawyer offers a series of brief reflections—personal, political, and literary.
Debut author Mayer was a successful attorney—“I made more money than I thought anyone could spend”—but was also inclined to meandering intellectual peregrinations, as evidenced by this eclectic assortment of essays. He covers an extraordinary expanse of meditative territory, discussing by turns matters both personal and philosophical. Many of the chapters—mostly very short and comprised of quick, reflective paragraphs almost aphoristic in their concision—explore the author’s obvious love of literature. A prodigious reader, Mayer opines on Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Céline, and Flannery O’Connor, among many others, and returns more than once to those books that exerted a lasting influence on him, like Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Some of his most trenchant aperçus come in the form of ruminations on his literary favorites: “We cannot solve the problem of suffering because we have fallen. Belief does not insure happiness and perhaps happiness does not even exist at our deeper levels. What does exist in Ms. O’Connor’s world is Grace. Grace is not deserved or demanded—it just is.” Mayer also touches on a host of other diverse subjects, including his career; friends and family; celebrities that apparently interest him; and the vexing nature of partisan politics. In one of the volume’s highlights, “Clarence Darrow as Told by Earl Rogers,” Rogers details his impressive claim to minor fame—the lawyer once defended the legendary attorney Darrow in a jury bribery trial in Los Angeles. Mayer, who is often facetious and wryly ironic, has Rogers voice these fictional claims in the essay: “Darrow would not be in the top one hundred trial lawyers ranked by those who know something about it. I would easily be in the top five and maybe first. Still, you have never heard of me.” The author has a lively and free-ranging mind and writes in lucidly elegant prose: “The question remains, can an immoral person be a genius and leave us something of lasting value? I believe so. A sinner sees things that virtuous people cannot see and genius is a gift from the gods that we best not squander.” The political essays are the least satisfying since they have an axe-grinding partisan bent that’s simply incompatible with either thoughtfulness or rigor: “Modern Conservatives hate the premise that we must be communal to survive and prosper. They see life as violent and a zero sum game.” In addition, the assemblage of essays as a whole has no discernible thematic core, some tonal key to which the parts intelligibly recur, other than the fact that they are all emanations of a single author’s mind. Further, the volume is not a particularly personal memoir, neither an autobiographical chronicle nor an emotional confessional. This compels the question: For whom is this book intended? In fact, given the peripatetic character of the essays and their almost outlinelike brevity, Mayer’s work doesn’t read as if it was envisioned for general consumption.
A collection of essays with many virtues.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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