A fervent portrait of the artist as a young screw-up—an old one, too, who writes like an avenging angel.
Noted crime writer Ellroy (Blood’s a Rover, 2009, etc.) presents a sharp-tongued, acidic memoir of his life and loves.
The author’s loose-living mother, Jean Hilliker, has figured deeply in his previous work—one need only read The Black Dahlia (1987); his father less so, and Ellroy paints him memorably: “He had the bunco-artist gab and the grin…He dodged work and schemed like Sergeant Bilko and the “Kingfish” on Amos & Andy. The pastor at my church called him ‘the world’s laziest white man.’ He had a sixteen-inch schlong. It dangled out of his shorts. All his friends talked about it. This is not a wacked-out children’s reconstruction.” That’s a volatile combination sure to leave marks on a young boy’s psyche, but it’s the mother’s curse—to say just what it is would steal some of Ellroy’s thunder—that really does him in. The author’s ’50s is not that of Leave It to Beaver—not with Dad and Mom setting the examples. By the time he was 13, Ellroy was chugging cheap wine, peeping into windows and reading deeply into warlock-haunted literature that “formally sanctioned me to lie still and conjure women.” Ah, and the women he conjured. There’s Susan, who swigged cough syrup and downed stolen pills with him (“we talked classical music shit endlessly”); Charlotte (who “thought I drank too much”); Helen (“I lacked her omnivorous view of the world in all its lively flux. She lacked my brutal will”; and…well, a lot of ands, remembered over half a century in this Nabokovian exercise in time travel, with confessions of vice and addiction and, mostly, half-truths told and believed. It’s vintage Ellroy, full of bile and invective and utterly unsparing to anyone—including the author himself, who manages to let slip away most of the good things he finds and spends a few fortunes in the bargain, yet keeps on plugging.
A fervent portrait of the artist as a young screw-up—an old one, too, who writes like an avenging angel.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-59350-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
