In this artful political and literary memoir, the 57-year-old Peruvian author (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990, etc.) and presidential candidate demonstrates the conflict between ideals and politics, art and power. Switching between his personal and his political lives, Vargas Llosa depicts his stormy childhood divided between his mother's loving family and his abusive father, who sent the boy first to a Catholic school, where a priest's sexual abuse turned him against sex and religion, and then to a military school, where he won respect for the love letters and erotica he provided his classmates. By 16, he was a working journalist for the sensationalist press, and, after entering the state-run university — notorious in the '50s for its lapsed academic standards, student unrest, and impoverished socialist thinking — became a research assistant for a historian of Peru. At 19, he married his 32-year-old aunt (described in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), a choice he came to regret on his first trip to Paris, which he won in a writing contest. The alternate political chapters start with his decision in 1987, aged 50 and an accomplished writer returning from a long residence in Europe, to address a demonstration of a new political party, the Freedom Movement. He later became the party's presidential candidate, and describes his platform as a visionary program of social, educational, and economic reform capable of empowering the lower classes and rescuing Peru from the authoritarian and militaristic government that destroyed its spirit and its culture. He campaigned under the threat of terrorism, kidnapping, and violence that, he writes, chacterize Peruvian politics. Vargas Llosa's narrative skill and novelist's eye animate the unfamiliar politics, people, and culture of Peru. Essential political as well as literary reading.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15509-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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