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GENIUS IN DISGUISE

HAROLD ROSS OF THE NEW YORKER

A thoroughly classy profile of the famously demanding founder and editor of the New Yorker. In getting this well-rounded portrait of Ross (18921951) on paper, the first-time biographer has balanced large details with small. Kunkel straightforwardly records how a high-school dropout, bitten by the reporting bug, propelled himself from the American West into WW I (where he helped develop Stars and Stripes) and then in 1925 was positioned for launching what was long considered the world's best magazine. Which was not, Ross wrote in his prospectus (included here), meant to attract ``the old lady from Dubuque.'' Ross slapped his materializing dream into shape with the aid of writers, editors, and friends like Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, Katharine Angell White, William Shawn, and James Cagney. They're all here, waving their tics and peccadilloes like banners. He details the intricacies of Ross's troubled relationships with his three wives and with co-founder Raoul Fleischmann. A prankster and a worrier, and a man with hair like ``a privet hedge'' and ``a notoriously limp handshake,'' Ross had many qualities that recommended him—and lots that didn't. Kunkel doesn't miss any of it—the Algonquin Round Table, the meager Depression coverage, the extensive WW II coverage, the decision to run John Hersey's ``Hiroshima''—while making the overriding point that no one racks up these kinds of accomplishments by accident; he dispels the popular ``caricature'' of Ross as a rude rube who miraculously produced the urbane New Yorker. Kunkel observes that ``the man from Aspen was an outsider set loose in New York, exhilarated, intimidated, and appalled by turns at what he saw, but never, ever bored.'' Kunkel writes with such fair-mindedness and so convincingly that readers, including the old lady from Dubuque, will need to remind themselves that they didn't know Ross personally.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-679-41837-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

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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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