Essential reading about a writer whose major novels continue to command attention.
How do you top Catch-22? Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; One Day the Wind Changed: Stories, 2010, etc.) attempts to answer that question and more in this first full-length biography of Joseph Heller (1923–1999).
When Heller’s sprawling World War II picaresque was published in 1961, few predicted it would become a defining novel of the decade, let alone add a new word to the language or still be selling a half-century later. Daugherty has a natural feel for the texture of Heller's worlds, both physical and cultural: his impoverished Coney Island youth, the gung-ho patriotic fervor of World War II, the Beat Generation and the corporate culture of Madison Avenue, where Heller worked by day while toiling on his first novel by night. Daugherty is especially good at capturing the whirlwind events of Catch-22’s publication—a “literary Manhattan Project” whipped into shape by editor Robert Gottlieb (who advised shuffling chapters to get to the funny parts quicker) and packaged and sold by superstar agent Candida Donadio. The author also has a strong sense of the 1970s cultural malaise against which Something Happened (1974) was written, and how Good as Gold (1979) anticipated a more materialistic age. Eventually, Heller’s success led to philandering, a messy divorce and estranged children; a crippling bout with Guillain-Barré Syndrome and waning critical esteem only made things worse. Throughout this absorbing biography, Heller’s moods, affability, wit, seriousness and selfishness all shine through. Daugherty’s attention to the details of his divorce and diet become mundane, and he can get a little too chummy with “Joe” the writer. However, he also has a fine sense of what Heller was up against with Catch-22, as he tried to forge a fresh, irreverent outlook—absorbed from writers such as Jaroslav Hašek, Celine and Nabokov—on a war that had already been defined by James Jones and Norman Mailer. Also, Daugherty scores some strong critical insights regarding the author’s style—e.g., “Instinctually, Joe knew the relentless rhythms of Borscht Belt jokes were like the incantatory prayers one finds in Psalms: The transition from one to the other was natural, almost unnoticeable.”
Essential reading about a writer whose major novels continue to command attention.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59685-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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