A deeply considered essay on the Chicano movement's worldly Aquinas. Best known through his thinly disguised appearance as Hunter S. Thompson's drug-gobbling Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), the Mexican-American lawyer and political activist Oscar Acosta receives a faithful, and appropriately irreverent, biographical rendering in the hands of Mexican intellectual Stavans (The Hispanic Condition, 1995, etc.). Although the outlines of Acosta's story are well known, Stavans has secured access to a number of hitherto unknown sources, notably a trove of letters, journals, and literary manuscripts held by Acosta's son. These give further testimony to Acosta's abilities as an authorwhich fans of his books The Revolt of the Cockroach People and Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo already recognizedand shed new light on his profound difficulty in coming to grips with being a dark-skinned Indian in a world he suspected dealt good hands only to white players. While tracing the contours of his life, Stavans reiterates Acosta's assertion that it was he, and not Thompson, who invented the term ``Gonzo journalism,'' and he provides good evidence to suggest that Acosta should have been credited with coauthorship of Fear and Loathing, the book that cinched Thompson's fame. Acosta disappeared, Ambrose Biercelike, in Mexico in 1974. He would be 61 today, and it would be a fine thing to see the wily Acostawhom Stavans headily deems an outlaw amalgam of Robin Hood, Joaqu°n Murrieta, Gregorio Cortez, Agust°n Sandino, Subcomandante Marcos, and Che Guevarareemerge at an autograph party in celebration of this worthy appreciation. A fine, learned homage to ``the king of rascuachismo, el rey of low taste,'' a man who contained worlds, but never comfortably.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-438557-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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