A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
An American traveler shares his notes of times abroad.
In his debut memoir, Bermann treats his readers to 10 years of sallies to spots far from his Houston hometown, places such as Colombia, Kenya, and the Philippines. Bermann tells of carrying bottles of alcohol effortlessly through airport security, flirting with attractive women the world over, and endeavoring to make the most of his time away from home. His accounts of many conversations with strangers along the way show him to be a friendly, easygoing sort, as happy to share jokes on the deck of a boat as he is to snorkel with the sharks beneath it. The author is also an avid sports fan, and his account is most absorbing when he describes the many baseball games that he’s traveled to see (“The Boston Red Sox did most of the good things,” he writes of an All-Star game at Yankee Stadium, “but they were booed anyway”). Bermann is a talented sportsman, and he reprints a pageslong passage from his friend Finn Aagaard’s 1992 book Aagaard’s Africa, which describes how Bermann felled a Cape buffalo with a single shot. Bermann’s own detailed prose convincing makes his journeys seem desirable. However, the book often reads like a series of disconnected jottings. Because the text has no proper introduction, readers are left to piece together for themselves who different people are, what prompted several trips, and, in some cases, even what took place. For example, one anecdote about Belize “cave tubing”—traveling through caves in large, inflatable inner tubes—reads, nearly in full, “We had a guide that took us through the caves. After that, we headed back.” What did the caves look like? A few paragraphs later, the author tells of being joined by some young men on a boat: “They carried on about a lot of things that we all got a good laugh over.” What was so funny? Overall, the book fails to take into account such details, which mars a potentially worthy account.
A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.Pub Date: March 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-5350-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
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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