A biography, which is also a composite picture, of the mainspring of the New Yorker, presents Harold Wallace Ross during his 27 year marriage to that magazine, as the author, and many others, knew and remembered him. From a series of pieces in the Atlantic Monthly this has turned into an "ordeal of love", in which the research, the recall with friends and fellow workers, and the whole backtracking of sidelights on Ross, his standards for his publication and his methods of running it, meshes into a many prismed view of the man, his time, his editorship, his writers and staff, and the growth of a provincial sheet into an internationally accepted American weekly. There are stories and stories, about the art conferences, the various departments and the parade of names that contributed — or failed to — the magazine's growing stature: Sayre, Johnston, Ingersoll, Sullivan, Cheever, Addams, Hokinson, Arno, Woollcott (and the non-stop mutual sniping between him and Ross), Gibbs, the Whites, O'Hara, Lardner, Mosher, Parker, Benchley, McNulty, Walker, Wilson, McKelway, and more and more. The $71,000 embezzlement by Ross' private secretary, Harold Winney; the legal crises and law suits; the intramural feuds, even with Raoul Fleischmann whose money kept the wheels turning from its earliest, unpromising days, down to the running of the whole office; and, above and beyond, the fighting, snarling, obdurate, ignorant, remarkable, worried, wondering, baying, troubled —and perfection seeking editor — the Ross, at his worst and at his best, whose warming touches kept loyalties (and the right enemies) to the lonely, failing end in 1951. An affirmation of a love for a man, as well as his profession, this accords full tribute, to one whom many will "never forget as long as I live", with mind as well as heart. Thurber's drawings will enhance this commemorative.
Pub Date: May 28, 1959
ISBN: 0060959711
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1959
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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