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WHISTLED LIKE A BIRD

THE UNTOLD STORY OF DOROTHY PUTNAM, GEORGE PUTNAM AND AMELIA EARHART

The biography of a bright, talented, adventurous, athletic, financially solvent woman who married a bright, talented, adventurous, etc., man, but whose life never seemed to live up to those promises. What's untold about this story is that Dorothy Binney Putnam was having an affair with a man 20 years younger some time before her publisher husband, George, met, published, and married Amelia Earhart. That takes Dorothy off the hook as an abandoned woman, but fails to answer the question: Does it matter to anyone except her relatives? Chapman is the granddaughter of Dorothy Putnam and the heir to Dorothy's diaries. Excerpts from the diaries set the stage for chapters in her life, from the early 1900s, when Dorothy was a teenager, to 1982, when she died, after surviving four husbands. (Her young lover, George Weymouth, was not one of the husbands.) Dorothy Putnam's home base both as daughter (to the inventor of Crayola crayons) and wife to Putnam was Sound Beach, Conn., where she built a memorable home, served as remarkable hostess, entertaining her husband's authors, and nurtured her children. She sailed with explorer William Beebe but was never able to exploit her adventurous spirit or her other talents—singer and pianist, plus she could whistle like a bird- -to achieve on her own. When she finally left Putnam to Earhart, she remarried within a month after her divorce was final and settled in Florida. This husband beat her, the next fled west to Hawaii, and the last—and ``best''—died after only four years of marriage. The diary entries that are the basis for this book are brief, almost brusque, and do not display what was apparently Dorothy's considerable charm. What's here finally is no more than a granddaughter's tribute to a woman who was the ex-wife of the man who married Amelia Earhart. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: July 24, 1997

ISBN: 0-446-52055-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997

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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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