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PROPHET

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KAHLIL GIBRAN

An absorbing biography of the beloved poet, philosopher, artist, and author of The Prophet. Waterfield has previously published an anthology of Gibran’s work, The Voice of Kahlil Gibran, and sets out here to correct the hagiographic portrait of Gibran (1883—1931) often painted by his followers. True, Waterfield asserts, Gibran was a genius, but he was also a complex man haunted by insecurities. Waterfield’s task is arduous in part because Gibran left a legacy of romanticized pasts for himself; at various times he claimed that he had been raised in a palace, had published romantic ballads in Syria and Egypt before emigrating at the age of 12, and had met the kaiser as a child. The reality was more a typical Ellis Island hardscrabble story, with Gibran, his mother, and his siblings escaping the poverty and patriarchy of their Lebanese background by coming to America. America was almost as cruel: Gibran’s mother and two of his three siblings died of terminal illnesses within a year of one another. Gibran sought refuge from his family’s hardships by drawing the portraits of the elite in Boston society, gradually playing upon their Oriental romanticism to be accepted (and financially supported) by them. After a classical Arabic college education back in Beirut, Gibran returned to America to make a name for himself in art and literature. He studied art in Paris, courtesy of an older benefactress to whom he was once engaged, then sampled the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. Waterfield ventures further than any of Gibran’s previous chroniclers by including the details of the artist’s often callous sexual dalliances and his alcoholism, which caused his early death from cirrhosis. Waterfield’s agenda here is not merely to expose the artist’s feet of clay, but to show him as a man, as capable of narcissism as spiritual depth, as gifted at ruthlessly using others as at charming them. The result is critical but well researched and cogently argued.

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-19319-X

Page Count: 384

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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