Witness to worlds in the midst of radical change, the author gives a commonplace appeal to the momentous events with her...
Intriguing historical circumstances and a big heart distinguish this second memoir by Gruber (Ahead of Time, 1991, etc.), onetime official in the FDR Administration and a Mideast correspondent during the postwar years that saw the birth of Israel.
Gruber begins in 1941, when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes asked her to serve as his field representative in Alaska. That not-yet state commands a large portion of Gruber’s text, as she recalls traveling about the wilderness and taking her own measure of it, “making a study of how to open Alaska to homesteaders”—which sounds a bit Manifest Destiny–ish and in fact is. She also details at length her experiences covering the plight of displaced Jews immediately following WWII, which prompted her to go head-to-head with anti-Semites in the US Department of State, with General George Patton, and with the British colonial administration. Gruber has lost some of the good journalist's knack for compression: snips of dialogue lead nowhere, and repetition rather than forceful imagery drives home her points. Her prose can be windy to the point of storm warning, the off-color jokes are jarringly antiquated, and comments like “In July 1941, Ion Antonescu, Romania's fascist dictator, began murdering his Jews” are rather mortifying. But her tales of being in harm's way can also display real power, whether the danger is physical—slogging through backcountry Alaska, dodging Nazis to spirit away refugees—or emotional, as when she reports on camps for displaced Jews in Germany, Cyprus, and even Israel: “Camps are never good for human beings. People deteriorate amid the abnormality of camp life.” No doubt the Palestinians would agree, yet the usually empathetic Gruber is mute on their predicament.
Witness to worlds in the midst of radical change, the author gives a commonplace appeal to the momentous events with her ingenuous storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1083-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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