by Tony Cohan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2003
Sometimes vivid, sometimes flaccid: at its best when conveying the unsettled feel of the birth of the ’60s.
Snapshots of old Hollywood and visions of beatnik Europe are interleaved in a memoir that explores the relationship between father and son.
Cohan (On Mexican Time, 2000, etc.) introduces us to his childhood with a recollection of one of his family's earliest outings: standing in a parking lot overlooking Los Angeles, he holds his father’s hand as they search for Cohan’s mother, who turns out to be sprawled in a ditch, drunk. Yet it’s Dad who comes in for the lion’s share of censure in this examination of what it took for Cohan to grow up and away from a stifling home life. Father Cohan, a one-time big-shot radio producer, was never able to come to terms with his fall from showbiz heights and spent the rest of his life in a struggle to convince himself and others (particularly his son) that his star hadn't dimmed. Meanwhile, the author’s mother first drank and then became rigidly sober, never at ease in the household. In the face of it all, Cohan turned to music, getting more and more adept at drumming until finally, in a post-collegiate year in Europe, he crossed paths with the jazz greats, backing Bud Powell and Dexter Gordon. In between these glorious moments, however, Cohan's early manhood consisted of poverty, small-time drug-smuggling, a failed marriage, and bewilderment. These recollections are interspersed with scenes of his father’s bluster, failing health, and eventual death. While Cohan’s prose can be engaging, much of the text is murky, slow, or just plain confusing.
Sometimes vivid, sometimes flaccid: at its best when conveying the unsettled feel of the birth of the ’60s.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-1020-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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by Tony Cohan
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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