Excellent. Longtime students of García Márquez will find fresh insights, and Stavans provides an excellent introduction for...
Illuminating study of the first writings of Colombian literary giant best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Appearing just months after Gerald Martin’s masterful biography Gabriel García Márquez, Stavans’s latest complements it with insightful readings of García Márquez’s work. The author begins with Hundred Years, a sprawling novel published in García Márquez’s 40th year, and, we learn here, written in a white-hot fury holed up in a Mexico City apartment. Stavans (Latin American and Latino Culture/Amherst Coll.; Resurrecting Hebrew, 2008, etc.) observes that the novel is “about memory and forgetfulness, about the trials and tribulations of capitalism in a colonial society, about European explorers in the New World, about the clash of science and faith, about matriarchy as an institution, about loyalty, treason, and vengeance in the political arena”—about, that is to say, just about everything, and with an endless jungle thrown in for a setting. Stavans writes literate literary criticism, but without academic archness and even with playfulness (he asks, for instance, “Quick: how many Aurelianos are there?”). His disquisitions pass academic muster nonetheless, well supported by a thorough reading of the relevant secondary literature as well as García Márquez’s own books. He makes an especially useful connection between Hundred Years and Don Quixote, each a microcosm of the Spanish-speaking world at the time of its creation—but also, he notes, a book that García Márquez resisted fiercely until reading it in visits to the lavatory. Stavans also notes the absence of a birth certificate and the author’s mythmaking about his early life.
Excellent. Longtime students of García Márquez will find fresh insights, and Stavans provides an excellent introduction for those readers new to the master’s work.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-24033-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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