What happens when an overachiever with almost perfect recall is let loose on autobiography? You get length, for a start. Documenting birth through age 34 enables Asimov to dwell lovingly on the minutiae stored in the temporal lobes, aided by diaries compulsively chronicling events (especially birthdays), habitats, typewriters or telephones acquired. You get excess. The writing persists in the look-at-me-I'm-cute/precocious/fat/erratically brilliant/flirtatious/honest style that marks Asimov introductions. You get cliches. The text contains lines like "we settled down in New York City's borough of Brooklyn where I was to spend my formative years," or "But it was off with the old and on with the new." The story itself, however, has a certain New York nostalgia appeal, Poor Jewish boy grows up in Brooklyn, Russian immigrant mom and pop run a candy store, work, work, work, eat, eat, eat, be the best. And of course Isaac was the best: skipped liberally in the lower grades, he went on to pimply-faced, skinny adolescence, rejection by the quota system from Columbia College (and later, by medical schools), always reading, doing things for himself, by himself: an erudite but totally sheltered existence. The familiar pattern of the first-born son pleasing a stern and demanding father (but there is affection) and a protective mother. There follow the Sad-Sack army days, the bliss of marriage, the beginning triumphs writing for the pulps, and finally the Ph.D. in chemistry, plus, at volume's end, a respectable assistant professorship at Boston University and renown as one of the luminaries of sci-fi's Golden Age. Of particular interest is Asimov's inside story of the evolution of that literary form, and the editors and agents who helped shape it. At half the length and with half the schmaltz, this 200th Asimov title would have been distinctly more memorable.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1978
ISBN: 038513679X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
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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