by Richard Harton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 1991
The fitfully entertaining adventures of an Englishman who enters the auction business expecting to find a hushed, cultured environment filled with fine gentlemen and women, and instead finds a quirky world peopled with myriad colorful characters. Harton begins with his applying at age 17 for a job at Charles Wilson and Co., Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers in Kington, England. The book takes off slowly with self-conscious descriptions of the ``eccentric'' firm and tedious tales of such common rites of passage as learning how to drive. By the middle of his narrative, however, Harton hits his stride and introduces one curious character after another. There's Mr. Rasely, a fellow art dealer whose ``sheen on his bespoke suits usually put our silver to shame''; Mrs. Pierce, a ``sparrow-like'' widow whose china gravy boat turns out to be a portable chamber pot worth over a thousand pounds; and Mrs. Weinberg, a lonely German cellist who frequents the auction house ``wheeling and dealing to supplement her income, trying to sell the things for a profit before she paid for them.'' Harton is often genuinely interesting and funny, but he has an unfortunate tendency to overdraw his characters, overemphasizing their accents (as in ``all roight than, Oy'll wait ter 'ear from 'em,'' or ``never mind, eet weel be our leetle secret'') and otherwise treating them in a condescending manner. He also introduces a love interest midway through that detracts from the narrative's main thrust and leaves the book's ending dangling in a most unsatisfying way. Harton is an amusing writer with many lively tales to tell, but he often overplays his hand and his observations lack depth.
Pub Date: July 19, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05981-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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