A fact-filled, if flatly executed, attempt to uncover the truth behind an American legend, by Kansas City Star reporter Kasper. Relying largely on Oakley's own scrapbooks, Kasper reveals a complex character far removed from the rough Western tomboy mythologized in popular lore. Born Phoebe Ann Moses to a Quaker farming family in Ohio, Oakley (1860-1926) discovered her lifelong passion and extraordinary talent at age eight after sneaking off with her father's hunting rifle. When she was 20, local farmers pitted her against circus sharpshooter Frank Butler in an impromptu contest. Winning both the match and her rival's heart, Oakley (who married Butler) soon gained a career when she stepped in for her new husband's ailing partner. In 1886, with Butler now serving as devoted manager and assistant, Oakley joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Petite and slender, clad in a prettily embroidered skirt and blowing kisses, the ``prim'' star used ``humor, pantomime, and drama''—along with astounding shooting prowess—to captivate audiences in America and Europe for 17 years, finally retiring with dignity and self-made fortune intact. Kasper pointedly emphasizes the ``paradox'' informing both Oakley's appeal and her place as a ``symbol of the liberated woman.'' Conservative and proper, she was appalled by bloomers and uncertain about women's suffrage—but, at the same time, she was a feminist ``despite herself,'' constantly proving the truth of her statement that women could equal men in anything ``outside of heavy, manual labor.'' Despite first-rate research, though, Kasper fails for the most part to go past quotes and chronology to the deeper historical and personal analysis necessary to animate Oakley and her world. The result is an admirable but unsatisfying sketch. A bit wide of the mark but with a worthy enough target to warrant readers giving it a shot. (Thirty illustrations.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8061-2418-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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