This autobiographical look at 1960s hippie culture from the point of view of actor Coyote (E.T., Outrageous Fortune, etc.) tends more toward observation than introspection. Coyote began his sojourn in the counterculture with the San Francisco Mime Troupe—a ground-breaking experiment in political theater that led almost immediately to Coyote’s long-standing association with the strongly antiestablishment Digger group, which preached a sort of Emersonian self-reliance based on the philosophical freedoms of mankind—which included the freedom, for instance, to steal what you think is yours. Coyote wandered from commune to commune, all the while crossing paths with the famous and soon-to-be-famous, including music promoter Bill Graham, the musician Michael Bloomfield, and the Beat poet Gary Snyder. In the meantime, he also made the acquaintance of several members of the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, and these connections and other societal pressures led Coyote into a heroin habit that was —cured— only after he was treated by an Indian shaman. Still, after this —cure— Coyote continues to abuse drugs. Because he never does fully address the matter of his drug dependence, or his complex relationship with Sam, his lover and the mother of his daughter, the book never seems to have much heft as a self-excavation. It’s really only Coyote’s troubled relationship with his abusive but brilliant father that gets the attention from the author that it requires. Equally disturbing and unexamined are Coyote’s friendships with the openly racist Hell’s Angels, as well as the frequent appearance of guns in what many might assume had been a peaceful subculture. (A part of this book, under the title —Carla’s Story,— won the 1994 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-67-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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