Continuing in the brisk, anecdotal style of The Blindfold Horse (1988), which told of her enchanted Persian childhood, Guppy reviews her years in 1950's Paris. Although the setting and many of Guppy's characters may be familiar to Western readers, the leading lady herself is distinctive, sharing early impressions and the start of enduring friendships with a subtle effervescence. All things seem possible as the young student, away from home for the first time, settles into a cramped room, tries alcohol, masters French, and mixes with an international array of brilliant students, artists, philosophers—people of promise. In less gifted hands, this scene would be hackneyed; but Guppy (now a Paris Review editor) invests it with a spark, an astute vision, and ensures a cordial reception. She hears Casals and the shy Segovia (playing as if the guitar ``were part of his very body''); meets Ilya Ehrenburg, Calder, and Camus; is inspired by The Second Sex even as Sartre and Beauvoir nearly pass by her window; and enters into the inevitable first relationship (one Pierre) before taking his measure. Throughout, Guppy recalls her Saint-Germain experience as a kind of intellectual tourism and deftly returns to the sources of particular formative ideas—a book, a music teacher, a neighbor- -with impressive ease. At the close, with her customary good luck, Guppy meets her future husband on a last stopover before returning home. If we're lucky, her next book will be about her London years. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-434-30852-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Heinemann
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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