A scholarly edition of the original 1879 autobiography by William Frederick Cody (1846–1917), who in his lifetime became perhaps the most famous American in the world.
Editor Christianson (English/BYU; Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells, 2008) offers a useful introduction and a number of appendixes and illustrations to illuminate Cody’s celebrated text: photographs, chronology, letters and even an excerpt from one of Ned Buntline’s risible dime novels about Cody. But the centerpiece is the autobiography itself, a document at once self-effacing, unpretentious and profoundly disturbing to contemporary eyes. Cody wrote the book—Christianson argues he had little, if any, help, though no manuscript survives—when he was on the cusp of the worldwide fame that would enrich him. He was touring theaters around the country but was also still actively scouting for the military in the summer of 1876 when his friend Gen. George Custer last stood at the Little Big Horn. Cody was also friends with Wild Bill Hickok and met Kit Carson and any number of other frontier notables. Cody begins with his birth in Iowa and then narrates the experiences that led to his movements west (his father’s early death put him to work early on wagon trains), his adventures with the Pony Express, horse racing, scouting and hunting buffalo. Cody writes proudly about killing some 4,200 bison. Much of the second half involves chasing and killing Indians, running away from Indians, scalping Indians, getting married, making babies, disparaging Indians—and African-Americans, about whom Cody writes in a way that would make Huck Finn blush. Cody never for a moment questions his right to slaughter herds or to kill and scalp human beings. A reminder of the deep belief we once held in white supremacy and manifest destiny.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3291-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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