Poet Ackerman (The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral) spent a few weeks, on and off, on the Tesquesquite, a vast New Mexican cattle ranch, in search of the vanishing cowboy, and came up with this self-absorbed account. She times her seasonal visits to coincide with such chores as branding and calving, works alongside the men, and describes both the timeless procedures and the new technological aids—from tape decks to helicopters—of the cowboy's trade. But her observations are clouded by romance: all the cowboys are beautiful, rough, and tough, all their horses "tightly muscled and meticulously trained." Being a cowboy, it turns out, is very hard work—dirty, bone-shattering, and endless—but mundane questions of wages, benefits, and longevity (or why the cowboy vanishes) are not her concern. She confides some tricks of the cowboy's trade—such as how to use a horse for a sundial—and often waxes poetic about the "dramatic" landscape and the "thrill" of cowboy-watching. But mostly she is concerned with "why on earth should I come here" among strangers "who baffle easily when I speak in my normal way." The western terrain—especially the description of work—is engrossing, but the poet's little condescending sayings and doings are more tedious than any prairie.
Pub Date: April 15, 1980
ISBN: 1555914683
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1980
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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