A mediocre, clichÇ-riddled tale of America’s first black naval aviator, by the author of To Kill the Leopard (1993) and numerous other works. Taylor starts his tale with the moment when Brown was shot down behind enemy lines at the onset of the Korean war. From there he jumps back to Brown’s childhood in a dirt-poor Mississippi farm town, then forward again to Brown’s college career and military training. Taylor has a potentially powerful story of one man’s striving against both institutional and individual racism in the American military, but his disjointed back-and-forth narrative is made worse by the fact that the author continually reads into Brown’s emotions to describe what his feelings were, say, regarding racial slurs and slights, while providing little basis for his analysis. Further, while Taylor finds his stride in describing the military side of his subject’s life—particularly his initial attempt at learning to fly and his battle exploits—the account of his civilian life falls flat. Brown’s own letters, to his wife and parents and former teachers, interspersed throughout the book, are far livelier than Taylor’s writing; for instance, he describes training and his fear of failure. Finally, Taylor relies on the most stereotypical descriptions possible; in writing of Brown’s first experiences among airplanes, a dirt runway was, he writes, “his path to the sky.” While Brown’s story is an important one, Taylor imbues it with the charm and cadences of a volume for young adults—hardly a fitting tribute to Brown, who was a subject of one of President Reagan’s inspirational stories of the American dream. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97689-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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