![]() ![]() All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. 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. 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. Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.īorn and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. Wiesel’s memoir, first published in English in 1960, has emerged as a classic work of literature from that darkest of eras, and it deserves to be read and reread for decades to come. As he recounts the flight before the advancing Red Army deep into a collapsing Germany, Wiesel draws on the voices of many of his fellow inmates, one of whom memorably says of Adolf Hitler, “he alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” Only the promise of utter extermination goes unfulfilled, leaving the author to contemplate the dead man walking that he has become when the camp is finally liberated: “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” As the memoir opens, Wiesel is a schoolboy in a Transylvanian town, studying with a wise scholar named Moishe the Beadle, who liked to say, “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him.” The great question that emerges as events sweep in, brought to Sighet on German troop transports and Hungarian police vans, is, of course, why? No fully satisfactory answer ever emerges from Wiesel’s tour of the hell that ensues, as the ghetto-“ruled by neither German nor Jew it was ruled by delusion”-gives way to the concentration camp and its endless brutalities, administered by Germans and kapos alike. ![]() But it packs a whole world-perhaps better, a whole inferno-into that brief span, much trimmed from a draft reported to be eight times longer. ambassador Samantha Power, and Wiesel’s son Elisha and including Wiesel’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and lecture and a commemorative address before the U.N., Night is a slender book, just a shade more than 100 pages long. A reissue of Wiesel’s ( Open Heart, 2012, etc.) foundational, exemplary memoir of the Holocaust.Įven though bracketed by post-mortem appreciations by Barack Obama, genocide scholar and former U.N.
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