A revelation—Wright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated.
One of the state’s most renowned writers takes readers deep into the heart of Texas.
As a staffer for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Wright (The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, 2016, etc.) has illuminated a variety of intriguing subcultures. His native Texas is as exotic as any of them. He approaches his subject on a number of levels: as a stereotype, a movie myth, a cultural melting pot, a borderland, a harbinger of what is to come in an increasingly polarized and conservative country, and as a crucible that has shaped the character of a young writer who couldn’t wait to escape but was drawn back. “Some maybe cowardly instinct whispered to me that if I accepted the offer to live elsewhere, I would be someone other than myself,” he writes. “My life might have been larger, but it would have been counterfeit. I would not be home.” The Austin-based author makes himself at home in these pages, traveling through Austin, Dallas, Houston, and El Paso and exploring the desolate wonders of Big Bend, “one of the least-visited national parks in the country, and also one of the most glorious,” and the West Texas wonders of Marfa, Lubbock, and Wink. The chapter on the levels of Texas culture, an updated version of a Texas Monthly piece from 1993, is particularly incisive. But the misadventures of the Texas legislature are what will strike most readers with an uneasy mixture of amazement, amusement, and disbelief; one law, notes the author, allows citizens to “openly carry swords, a welcome development for the samurai in our midst.” Once a Democratic bulwark (albeit conservatively so), the state has since become even more conservatively Republican, though a population that is not only growing, but growing younger and more diverse—the “Anglo” majority has become the minority—could make the state very much in play.
A revelation—Wright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52010-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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