Sultan has a terrific subject in Sunny and his semilegendary watering hole, but the approach is too cute.
An insider’s look at a sui generis Brooklyn institution.
Sultan’s account of his tenure as a regular of Sunny’s, a storied tavern nestled in the outer-borough wilds of Red Hook, Brooklyn, functions effectively as both a warm celebration of a singular character and his unusual saloon and as an evocative consideration of Red Hook’s colorful history and distinctive personality. On the other hand, the narrative often veers perilously close to a recitation of a stranger’s crazy nights on the town—the sort of tale that the teller finds endlessly fascinating and hilarious but which the listener endures with a polite, I-guess-you-had-to-be-there smile. Sultan’s self-consciously literary prose style—when not slumming in a backwater dive, he hobnobbed with the likes of George Plimpton—exacerbates the general sense of authorial self-indulgence. The arch descriptions of the various eccentrics, bohemians, criminals, and lost souls who populate Sunny’s suggest a condescending sort of self-congratulation. The titular Sunny, a charismatic, unlettered, but brilliantly loquacious poet/painter/bartender who conducts his life and business as a series of artistic whims, does vividly emerge as a memorable, fully fleshed-out character. “He could be loyal and libertine, sometimes migrainous in his stubbornness and his foolish addictions,” writes the author. “I admire him to no end for being the most original man I have ever met.” Sunny’s secluded bar, open only on Fridays, home of cheap drinks, impromptu hootenannies, and experimental film screenings, sounds like a uniquely strange and cozy urban refuge. It deserves a remembrance, and Sultan’s will serve, but the excessively mandarin tone casts a pall. Readers with further interest in the bar should watch the episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain visits the bar.
Sultan has a terrific subject in Sunny and his semilegendary watering hole, but the approach is too cute.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6727-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
