An immersive and well-told account of a father and his legacy.
In this debut book, a writer shares the story of his father, an innovative structural engineer.
Weidlinger remembers his father, the Hungarian-born Paul, as full of amazing tales: of being arrested and sentenced to death at the age of 18; of becoming an apprentice of Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy and pioneering modernist architect Le Corbusier; of striving to “protect the world” from a nuclear war. Even so, there was much mystery surrounding Paul, who spoke seven languages and had worked on three continents. For example, Weidlinger did not discover that his father was Jewish until he was an adult and found Paul’s will (in which, it so happens, the author was not mentioned). It wasn’t until Paul died in 1999 and Weidlinger inherited a box of his papers that he was finally able to dig deeper into the life of the man. “It was clear that it was in those documents,” writes the author in his introduction, “in the languages I could not understand, that I would most likely find the evidence to prove or disprove his fantastic tales.” A portrait emerges of a Holocaust survivor who, through a series of remarkable encounters, was able to collaborate with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century and help change the way that people thought about architectural design. It is also the story of a man surrounded by tragedy, from the deaths of family members in World War II to the institutionalization of his wife for paranoid schizophrenia. Weidlinger writes with energy and compassion, even about topics that are understandably close to him, as here, when he discusses his father’s influence on his mother’s breakdown: “There are too many unknown factors and, if he did drive her mad, he did not do it with intent but rather with his own fear of her despair at seeing the ‘sharpest relations of things,’ things that were too dark for open conversation.” The book, which features family and architectural photographs, relates a captivating tale, with Paul simultaneously an archetypical European genius and a highly idiosyncratic figure. Fans of architecture will be particularly intrigued, but it is more broadly a story of the visionary upheavals of the 20th century.
An immersive and well-told account of a father and his legacy.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943006-96-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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