Wilkinson learned well from his mentor and brings that emotive, sympathetic bearing, beautiful and melancholy, with great...
A lovely tribute to novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell (1908–2000), who was for many years a mentor to Wilkinson (A Violent Act, 1993, etc.), as well as a neighbor, a father figure, and a friend.
“I derived my identity from Maxwell,” states Wilkinson, though he admits later that he also was shaped by his father, a man of many foibles with whom he failed to make the elementary connection that he had with Maxwell. There is a wonderful clear-headedness here, despite all the emotions swarming about. The older man would have appreciated Wilkinson’s uncluttered exposition of their relationship, for Maxwell was a writer of enormous elegance in work charged with feeling: “A writer should hold nothing back. Everything you have is never more than enough for the purpose at hand,” he believed. He was also a skillful editor: Wilkinson depicts Maxwell bringing imagination, receptivity, and sympathy, as well as intimacy with the technical possibilities, to the job of “understanding what a writer is trying to say and helping him say it if he needs the help.” Employing long quotes, Wilkinson draws a noble portrait of Maxwell and his wife, Emmy. He creates an enduring testimony to their long friendship, down to the last days when his affection for Maxwell was “worn like a garment over a sadness that was part loneliness and part despair and anger at being deprived of the one man I loved.” The element of catharsis is never gratuitous, but used to further the reader’s appreciation of Maxwell and of a relationship between two men that rings of Maxwell’s words: “You don’t thank people for being your friend, you thank God for your good fortune in having them as a friend.”
Wilkinson learned well from his mentor and brings that emotive, sympathetic bearing, beautiful and melancholy, with great immediacy to this homage.Pub Date: April 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-12301-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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