A straightforward narrative of the public life of a complex, commanding newspaperman.
A seasoned newsman reports on the life of one of America’s great newspaper heroes, a writer and editor who practiced his craft in Yiddish.
Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) was the founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, New York’s pre-eminent Yiddish newspaper. New York Sun and English-language Forward founder Lipsky presents a succinct biography of his distinguished predecessor as part of the burgeoning Schocken/Nextbook Jewish Encounters series. Born in czarist Russia, Cahan was born anew in 1882 when he landed in America, ignorant of the English language. He quickly conquered the native tongue of his new nation and wrote, in English, narrative fiction of immigrant life in a unique voice. His masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), was an epic novel of a poor immigrant who achieves considerable, but ultimately unfulfilling, wealth. In many ways, the novel paralleled the author’s own rise, though Cahan’s signal achievement wasn’t in the garment trade but in the newspaper that chronicled the culture of downtown Jews. The Forward ranked third of all the city’s morning papers in any language, and in its pages, newly arriving immigrants received instruction in American ways. The paper featured an agony column, which famously advised legions of troubled readers, and it published the works of Sholem Asch and the brothers Singer. Home to Jewish public intellectuals, it debated (not always on the right side) the Russian Revolution, Zionism, strike actions and a host of other urgent matters of the day. The paper was always anti-communist, and Cahan was always Jewish though never religious. In his autobiography, The Education of Abraham Cahan, he had little to say about his private life. Lipsky follows that example with scant information regarding Cahan at home.
A straightforward narrative of the public life of a complex, commanding newspaperman.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4210-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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