Talking to himself, Terkel is laconic, wry, sometimes baffling. He needs his machinery, his Sony and his Uher. ("I have a theory. I am a nco-Cartesian: I tape therefore I am.") He will reveal himself only as refracted through interviews with others, only in anecdotal banter. We learn in this memoir, a raggle-taggle patchwork, that Terkel was raised in his mother's Chicago hotel for transient men; there he learned to listen and to wait for the unforeseen moments when people reveal themselves. He learned from Civlization, the erudite dishwasher who regularly shot off "massive registered letters" to Ramsey MacDonald, Henry Ford, Leon Trotsky, Bertrand Russell, and "our city's most distinguished entrepreneur," Al Capone. He learned from the soapbox orators at Bughouse Square where "the colloquy was as convoluted as it was profound." He studied the underside of Chicago while running errands for petty gangsters and poll watching at rigged elections. Terkel admits to an abhorrence of confrontations or "scenes." Better to listen—though much of that listening is done during confrontations: on "jubilee day" in Montgomery, Ada., in 1965; in Chicago, 1968, where Terkel found himself locked in a hotel with Jules Feiffer, William Styron, and British journalist James Cameron. Though his peregrinations extend from Wales and Bertrand Russell—who will talk only about nuclear disarmament: "let them call me fanatic"—to the Artic Circle where a Swede asks him, "Mahalia Yackson. You know her?"—the inflections and sensibility here are all Chicago. Terkel keeps it taut all the way through; no solemnities, and much to laught at. He could make you believe that the world is populated by the cast-offs of Saroyan and O'Neill. Find yourself a corner and listen to him listen.
Pub Date: April 18, 1977
ISBN: 1565843193
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977
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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