A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)
Debut author Collins dissects the fickle fortunes of fame with 13 vignettes of men and women who dared to dream but failed to achieve.
What happens to the schemers and the dreamers whose plans lose their moorings in reality, whose theories do not quite jibe with actuality? Collins introduces us to a medley of such unfortunate souls, including the eponymous John Banvard. This true visionary created “moving panoramas,” an artistic innovation in which he claimed to scroll three miles of canvas before his audience’s unbelieving eyes; the resulting hullabaloo made him the star of the 19th-century art world until he was upstaged by master huckster P.T. Barnum. Now fallen into outright obscurity, Banvard serves as Collins’s leading exemplar of fame gone wrong, of early successes dashed by unlucky combinations of bad timing, bad luck, and bad judgment. The reader also meets such obscure figures as playwright and Shakespearean plagiarist William Henry Ireland, John Cleves Symmes (who attempted to prove that the earth is hollow and inhabited on the inside), Professor Rene Blondlot (discoverer of the non-existent N-rays—similar to X-rays but, well, nonexistent), Ephraim Bull (who lost out to Thomas Welch in the race to cash in on Concord grapes), and A.J. Pleaston (who recommended growing plants and healing humans with the salubrious effects of blue light). These unfortunates, as well as the others Collins has dug up from obscurity, made noble attempts to change the world for the better and failed miserably. One might quibble with some of Collins’s selections for inclusion (some of the failures are not nearly as spectacular as the others), but the joy of the lot lies in contemplating the whims of fortune and the foolhardiness of humanity, while delighting in Collins’s crisp prose and engaging storytelling.
A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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