Full of record accomplishments—youngest Ph.D. in Germany, first American correspondent to travel to the Soviet Arctic—this memoir of her 1920's and 30's by veteran journalist Gruber (Rescue, 1987, etc.) is high on action but low on analysis. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Gruber was born and raised in Brooklyn, where her precocious academic abilities were soon recognized. Encouraged by mentors, she excelled, first in high school, then in college, majoring in English and German. Awarded scholarships, she went on to graduate school in Wisconsin and at the Univ. of Cologne. There, in 1932, where she became at 20 the youngest Ph.D. in Germany, she also witnessed the growing power of Hitler and the spread of anti-Semitism. Intent on being a writer, Gruber returned to New York, but because of the Depression, jobs were scarce, and she began writing free-lance pieces for the New York Herald Tribune. A travel fellowship enabled her to return to Europe in 1935 as a correspondent for the Tribune to study women under democracy, Fascism, and Communism, which she did by traveling in Germany, where old friends had either fled or joined the Nazis; in England, where she had a disappointing interview with Virginia Woolf; and in the Soviet Union, where she traveled in what we now know as the Gulag, first by train, then by plane, and finally by ship across the Arctic Ocean. A woman to admire, with a remarkable story that's undercut by lackluster prose and a tendency to deal superficially with the darker side of times past.
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-922066-64-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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