Deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics of uninhibited American introspection as On the Road and A Fan’s Notes.
An endlessly fascinating memoir by a profoundly courageous writer.
Novelist and cultural critic Elliott (My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, 2006, etc.) has plumbed his difficult life for his novels and short stories. A runaway at age 13, following his mother’s death, he spent years in group homes around Chicago, engaging in petty crimes and developing addictions to heroin and other narcotics, rather than stay with his violence-prone sadistic father. As he began his latest book, Elliott was just resuming a daily regimen of Adderall ingestion. Off the drug, he lost the focus to write anything. Back on it and experimenting with means of enhancing its amphetamine-like effects, his mind still raced, but he was better able to channel his energies into writing down his rapid-fire thoughts. His new book, he decided, would be about a murder trial getting underway in San Francisco, where he had settled after a restless post-adolescence period. In the spring of 2007, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Hans Reiser was accused of killing his Russian-born wife Nina, whose body had yet to be found. The author's interest in the case was sparked by a confession of Reiser's best friend Sean Sturgeon, with whom Nina had an affair. The confession reminded Elliott of his father's odd story that he killed a man who had publicly humiliated him the year before Elliott was born. Despite the luridness of the subject matter, the author creates a refined, beautiful work of art. His themes—seemingly crime, murder, drugs and sadomasochistic sex—actually encapsulate the nature of truth, self, love and memory, and the limits of art to get at them all.
Deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics of uninhibited American introspection as On the Road and A Fan’s Notes.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55597-538-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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