Holzer, author and editor of numerous books on the Civil War and Lincoln (The Lincoln Mailbag, not reviewed, etc.), has assembled another collection for those with insatiable appetites for information about the 16th president. Holzer has arranged the comments categorically: We hear first from family members, then from friends, from fellow lawyers, journalists, foreign observers, enemies, military men, noted authors, artists, African-Americans, and White House employees. Many excerpts are truly engaging. A cousin remembers that a horse once kicked the young Lincoln so hard that he was speechless for several hours; when he once again started talking, he completed the sentence that the kick had interrupted. A law partner recalls Lincoln’s annoying habit of reading the newspaper aloud. A Frenchman remembers listening to the president discourse on Shakespeare for hours. A sculptor relates a charming anecdote about Lincoln forgetting to put on his undershirt after posing. Many of the observers note the president’s lean and lanky and unkempt appearance: One says he looked like a “country schoolmaster”; another, a “professional undertaker.” Walt Whitman identifies the president’s “deep latent sadness.” A political enemy (Gen. George McClellan) calls him a “baboon”; an admirer (Harriet Beecher Stowe) compares him with Moses. And after her brief meeting with him, Sojourner Truth comments: “I felt that I was in the presence of a friend.” There is, unfortunately, a numbing sameness about some of the encomiums for Lincoln. A volume with a pleasing admixture of the strange and the familiar, of poignance and humor, of iron and irony. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1999
ISBN: 1-56512-166-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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