If you finish this brilliantly realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful...
Memoir of Jewish intellectual life and universal history alike, told through a houseful of books, their eccentric collectors, and the rooms in which they dwelled.
Chimen Abramsky (1916-2010) and his wife, Miriam, were easily overlooked people who made a long life in a brick house in North London. But they were giants of a kind, for what a house it was: sprawling and ramshackle but jammed to the rafters with books and papers, serving as “one of left-wing London’s great salons.” In this entertaining, deeply learned book, Sasha Abramsky (Writing/Univ. of California, Davis; The American Way of Poverty, 2013, etc.) adds materially to Chimen and Mimi’s 20,000 volumes. On another level, the book, like that grand library, is a narrative of the broad sweep of Jewish diaspora history. Chimen was a collector of useful books. For him, that doctrine of usefulness embraced the works of Karl Marx in explaining how the modern world works, Charles Darwin in explaining how life evolved, Maimonides in explaining how life should be lived, and so forth. Chimen had a sticky mind that remembered everything, and he made connections among all the things stored within: Abramsky the grandson remembers marveling when, as a very old man, Chimen, who “had almost certainly never once kicked a ball,” was able to discourse smartly on David Beckham’s career prospects simply by virtue of all the oddments he had collected about him. As the story unfolds, we follow Chimen and Mimi from room to room, most of them colonized by the former as the children grew up and moved out, and we hear their stories: of Chimen’s angry annoyance when someone said Hitler was crazy, which “gave Hitler and the Germans a free pass,” of the couple’s rich minds and witty conversations, and of the thought of vicariously “touching a book that Marx had owned and commented on.”
If you finish this brilliantly realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful celebration of the mind, history, and love.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59017-888-1
Page Count: 344
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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