A brilliant memoir illuminating a rich and complex life. (20 b&w photographs)
In language ranging from lush to poignant to erotic to horrifying, an eminent literary scholar recalls his childhood and youth.
Brombert (Romance and Comparative Literature Emeritus/Princeton Univ.) begins and ends with images of trains, recalling that as a child he wished to be a locomotive and noting that his Princeton colleagues honored him with a gold-plated train watch. Growing up in Paris, he traveled virtually everywhere by rail and was constantly animated by the experience. He was also a voracious reader and throughout offers considerable evidence for one of his early self-characterizations: “The lived experience and the literary one now color each other.” No matter what moment in his youth he is describing—his fantasies about women, his experiences in school, his dreadful experiences as a Jew in occupied France—Brombert is reminded of something he has read. Populating his pages, though never obtrusively, are Malraux, Stendhal, Boccaccio, Melville, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hugo, Coleridge, Shakespeare, and numerous others. (Some readers may be annoyed by his failure to translate the French and German he quotes.) Brombert is nothing if not candid, freely acknowledging such failures as hurting his parents, lusting after myriad women, deceiving teachers and military officers. Now, late in life, he seems at peace with himself and with scenes he can no longer rewind and revise. Most harrowing of these are his WWII experiences. His family escaped from France to the US in a marvelously improbable and exciting series of events, and Brombert then joined the US Army as an intelligence officer especially valuable for his command of English, French, German, and Russian. He landed at Normandy two days after D-day and survived the butchery of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Closing his main narrative with the end of the war, Brombert chides the US for employing former Nazis during Occupation and expresses horror at Hiroshima.
A brilliant memoir illuminating a rich and complex life. (20 b&w photographs)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05115-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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