A swift, intriguing journey through one man’s unique life.
Du Cane (Five Animal Frolics, 2002, etc.) provides a breezy memoir of his wide-ranging wanderings.
Beginning with accounts of setting things on fire in his youth in Sierra Leone (“I watched in fascination as my plastic truck went up in smoke”), the author goes on to explain many other notable occurrences in his later life. There is, for instance, his time as an experimental filmmaker and critic, during which he mingled with famous and not-so famous characters of the 1970s, with Bianca Jagger in the former group and Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Kris Patterson in the latter. Closer to the present day, during a 2009 trip to China, he found himself detained due to a swine-flu epidemic. It’s an experience that he recalls fondly in a vignette titled “Go Back to Your Room, You Are Under Investigation”: “Living in the lap of luxury at the expense of the Chinese Government was a fair trade for the loss of my freedom for a week.” All told, the author’s journey is a novel one that takes readers to disparate times and places, both physical and emotional, from an overland trip from London to India in 1969 to a reflection on his father’s death in 2012. He shares these experiences in very short chapters, and as a result, the book moves quickly, revealing bits of wisdom that he’s gleaned along the way. For example, after practicing a difficult-sounding form of tai chi called “Chen Style Cannon Fist,” the author came to learn that “I can satisfy my sense of self-worth in many more effective ways than by leaping up and down on hard floors to impress my teacher.” Many other memoirs plod through the past with painstaking description, but this one glides across its surface. The book is relatively short at less than 100 pages, and although the picture is not always complete (for instance, what made Du Cane turn away from experimental filmmaking?), the ease of the prose allows for an inviting, brisk experience.
A swift, intriguing journey through one man’s unique life.Pub Date: May 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5464-4965-2
Page Count: 94
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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