harrison gardner book review

Book review: Build Your Own

September 1, 2022, 11:11 am Favourite

Harrison Gardner’s Build Your Own book is a celebration of DIY, eco conscious self-building.

This hefty tome seems to have a double aim. One is to share knowledge and advice. The other is to get us to reach for the tools, conscious of our environmental impact as we do.

To get us to follow on this path, the cookbook style hardback is full of building recipes gleaned from Gardner’s experience as an ecobuilder. He’s got a list of essential tools and explains basic building physics and engineering concepts.

He then goes on to analyse the main fabric elements and provides an outline of the steps involved in getting stuck into an actual project. All interspersed with graphs and plenty of colour photographs.

In fact the book’s greatest strength is that it’s written in an accessible and engaging manner, making the process of building a lot less daunting than it can at first seem.

How that translates into practice will be revealed in a series due to air on RTÉ this autumn 2022 where Gardner will be helping people build their own homes. In the meantime, this reference guide is well worth adding to your collection.

Build Your Own: Use what you have to create what you need by Harrison Gardner, Gill Books, gill.ie , hardback, colour photographs, 278 pages, ISBN 9780717192649, €22.99

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Written by Astrid Madsen

Astrid Madsen is the editor of the SelfBuild magazine. Email [email protected]

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Build Your Own: Use What You Have to Create What You Need Kindle Edition

• Print length 417 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Gill Books
• Publication date 7 April 2022
• File size 39665 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Product description

About the author.

Harrison Gardner is an Australian eco-builder and sustainability designer based in the West of Ireland. Harrison is co-founder and executive director of Common Knowledge, a not-for-profit that aims to empower people with the skills and solutions for living a sustainable life. With over ten years' experience designing and managing the construction of conventional and off-grid buildings throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, the USA, Canada and South America, Harrison’s focus is on constructing community spaces, teaching individuals how to build and maintain their own homes, and sharing core construction principles and techniques. He built his own home and has taught hundreds of people to do the same.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09SXJ3MXY
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gill Books (7 April 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 39665 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 417 pages
• 81 in Home Repair
• 184 in Construction Technology
• 290 in Do-It-Yourself

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Harrison gardner.

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Description.

Making, maintaining and mending our own homes is part of what makes us human. It is a skill that was alive and well until just two or three generations ago. Harrison Gardner is a man on a mission to help us rediscover the lost art of building our own while leaving a more harmonious mark on the environment. Build Your Own explores the principles of construction and outlines a multitude of practices and methods that enable you to build a home with the materials available to you. Practical techniques, such as plastering, moving earth, basic demolition, installing insulation, building internal walls and attaching cladding, are demystified and made easy. Whether you plan to build your own structure, are curious about the idea or are dealing with construction workers, Build Your Own is an essential tool that shows that anyone can learn to build - and perhaps everyone should. 'A revolutionary book ... within it is the knowledge to empower you to shape and craft your own living space.' Manchan Magan

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Teaching people to self-build homes at Clare’s Common Knowledge project: ‘It is just looking backwards to go forward’

Harrison gardner and fionn kidney’s project in ennistymon is teaching people how to build their own homes, with a collective mindset.

Harrison Gardner (left) and Fionn Kidney, two of the four co-founders of Common Knowledge, Kilfenora, Co Clare. Photograph: Eamon Ward

Call it fate. During the pandemic, Fionn Kidney took himself west to live on an island off Mayo. It’s easy to imagine the effect: a quintessential city boy, busy professional with global time suddenly distorted, the Atlantic winds constant, and time, endless time, to think, and observe his new neighbours.

“Just a community of 60 people where, you know, everybody’s handy,” he says of the people of Inishturk. “And a lot of people can fish, farm, build a house, fix a pipe, whatever it is. But as well, just like, survive! They need to be interdependent and have that kind of community resilience. So, when I was leaving there, I wanted to go and get involved in something that was more socially oriented.”

He’d heard of a build-school in Clare run by an Australian, Harrison Gardner. He signed up. The pair clicked. One evening, they were chatting around the campfire. And Kidney told him about this idea he had for a community project that would revolve around the promotion of the stuff he witnessed in Mayo – community and self-sufficiency with a collective mindset. Gardner listened carefully.

“And Fionn told me about the idea of a social enterprise,” Gardner says. “He could see that we were not a profit-driven company. We weren’t in it to make money. We were giving buildings away, we were bringing people on the course for free who couldn’t afford it, to make sure as many people learned as possible. Fionn told me there was a structure for this thing that we were doing by accident.”

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Common Knowledge was born. In the beginning, they hosted build schools from the home Gardner built with his wife, Erin McClure, a designer who is, with builder Spider Hickman, one of the four co-founders of the project. But this year, the project moved to the buildings of a former Burren retreat which had been operated by a Dutch woman, Sonja O’Brien. She was delighted to see the buildings repurposed into a community enterprise.

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To acquire the property, they formed a board, including GIY founder Mick Kelly, writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan, climate adviser Ali Sheridan, and co-founder of Brave Lab Jess Hayden. At the first meeting, they built a table for the board room. The Common Knowledge project raised €60,000 in crowdfunding. They then raised another €200,000 through community bonds, with locals investing in €10,000 denominations, to be returned with interest over five years. The remainder of the sum would be obtained through commercial banks.

Harrison Gardner and Fionn Kidney at Common Knowledge, Kilfenora, Co Clare. Photograph: Eamon Ward

This March, they moved in. More than 200 people turned up for a meitheal week: weeding, building, painting, repairing, and getting the place habitable in jig-time. Now, on a squally typical west-of-Ireland summer’s day, where its threatening to rain but can’t quite be arsed, the week-long build course is packed to capacity.

“Our mission at Common Knowledge is to support people to have a truly sustainable home life,” Kidney says as he gives a tour of the grounds.

“So that it is affordable and sustainable and doesn’t harm the planet. Maybe you own a property. Maybe you are just setting out and wondering where to go. Or rather than buying a shelving unit from Amazon, you are deciding to fix and repair. A radical change in all our behaviour is needed if we are going to tackle the climate crisis or housing or cost-of-living crisis. Our question is: what are the first steps you can take in each or those areas? And that is why we are sharing these skills. It is to give people a pathway. A lot of the things we are teaching are not revolutionary at all, it is just looking backwards to go forward. The answer is not always buying it from cheapest, fastest, and easiest. Often, a lot of these skills were practised by previous generations.”

The new Common Knowledge home is not far outside Kilfenora, but you still need an Eircode to find it: it’s on a beaten track at a crossroads off the beaten track. It covers 50 acres. The group has got some funding for a biodiversity scan. “To understand what is living here,” Kidney says, looking out at the expanse of green. “But we have haw and hazel and a lot of beautiful Irish woodland.” Near the stone fire circle is the skeletal frame of a wooden sweat lodge, a remnant of the retreat. Rainbow chard and quinoa, peas, scallions and carrots are thriving in the vegetable area. Ciara Parsons, a perma-culture expert, is on-site regularly to oversee that project. Food is an important part of what they do. “You won’t get a better lunch anywhere between here and home,” Gardner promises.

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Guests eat together and socialise in the common room during breaks and in the evening. It’s pleasant: battered leather couches, a well-stocked bookcase, board games. No TV. The build schools run from Monday to Friday, with a maximum of 32 people taught by four dedicated instructors. So far, the profiles of those who sign on are just what Kidney and Gardner would have hoped for. Anyone from age 18 to 75. An equal split of male and female. About 10 per cent from the LGBTQ+ community. They’ve an access programme, too, for people who simply can’t afford the week-long fee (€850, with instalment options available).

Participants Tara Kelly and Kirstie Horgan with Harrison Gardner at Common Knowledge, Kilfenora, Co Clare.

Private rooms are available for €75 per night. There are also camping spots for €10. There are courses in organic growing, dry stonewalling, welding and DIY. They’ll even teach you how to build your own yurt. And because they’ve tapped into the most burning concern of an entire generation –where they are going to live – people are signing up. A staggering lack of governmental imagination has caused a generation to lose faith that they might ever become homeowners, still a sacred concept in Ireland. The rental model is broken: neither landlords nor tenants are happy. What Ireland does have, scattered around the country, are old buildings, long abandoned to the spiders and ghosts.

It is basically Lego what I do, compared to someone who has grown up surrounded by nature and has to figure how to turn that into a house —   Harrison Gardner

“People don’t really want to build their own home,” says Gardner. “But they don’t see any other way. For a lot of people, they’re looking at the housing market, and the only houses they can afford are ruins or derelict properties. So, they know they need to learn skills. For those same people, it’s just as unattainable to have a builder do that work for them as it is to buy a house that’s already finished and in good condition, because of costs.”

Trainees on a Common Knowledge course in The Burren, Co Clare.

Gardner attained a national profile after featuring in the recent RTÉ series with the no-fuss title, Build Your Own Home. The home-renovation show is a tried and trusted staple, but rather than the usual stress and unexpected-structural-flaw-wrecking-the-budget storyline, the Australian brought with him to site a Zen-like calm and dazzling optimism, which somehow made hacking through old walls and floorboards appear like an exercise in transcendental meditation.

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He laughs good-naturedly at the mention of the show. But as he talks about how he arrived in Ireland, his is a story of a kind of natural obsession with one of the primal needs: somewhere to live. He has lived just outside Ennistymon for eight years. The original plan was to stop in Ireland for three months on his way from Iceland to Malawi. He spent a decade as a nomad working on building projects around the world, and quickly learned that his formative experiences, in the conventional materials of masonry and timber, were limited.

“It is basically Lego what I do, compared to someone who has grown up surrounded by nature and has to figure how to turn that into a house.”

Working on roof truss contruction at Common Knowledge. Photograph: Eamon Ward

He moved through India and South America learning how to build from mud and even discarded garbage. In Colombia, he was part of a building team putting together some dwellings deep in the jungle.

“We were building an off-grid building that was completely self-sufficient. It had solar panels, a rainwater catchment, and its own sewerage system. We were building at the top of a very steep hill. We had to bring all our materials in by a small boat, and transfer them to a horse and cart, and then to a mule to get them up the rest of the hill. But the mule could only carry things that were in bags. So mostly we were the mules, carrying things up the hill to build this building.”

Instructor Elaine McFerran with students at Common Knowledge in Kilfenora, Co Clare. Photograph: Eamon Ward

He arrived in Ireland at an interesting time. In 2012, the nation was still punch-drunk from the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger. Houses prices had tanked. Hotel corridors were eerily silent. National confidence was on the floor of those same hotels. “It was all anyone was talking about when I got here,” he remembers.

The countryside and Irish towns were littered with unfinished dwellings. “Ghost estates” was the phrase of the era. For Gardner, it felt like a period rich in possibility. “There was a post-recession mood of: we can do anything! Everything was cheap.” He fell in with a crowd of people who were starting flea markets, furniture-making businesses and pop-up eateries. Some succeeded, some failed. It was easy to start again.

The peculiar thing was that while the national narrative was one of abject economic failure and a kind of shame, there was a surging sense of creativity among the people Gardner got to know. Driving through Clare, a ruined building caught his eye. “Coming from Australia, where there are no buildings over a hundred years old... It was for sale. For me, this was like a castle. I’d never had a chance to work on a building like that before.”

He decided to buy it with a view to busying himself with a project before he moved on. Life had other plans. He met Erin, who is from Clare. Now, the couple have two children. The cottage has become their home. It has a timber-frame kitchen extension and a bedroom or two added on.

Classroom sessions at Common Knowledge. Photograph: Common Knowledge

“We are building it as we go. And that is the only way we can afford to do it. And that works perfectly for us.”

He has no time for the fear that the recently announced government grants available to refit derelict houses will be dwarfed by the likely cost of the work involved.

“Ah no. It’s amazing. It’s really putting the spark into people to consider. The big thing is that every one of those buildings already has permission to be there. That’s hugely attractive to people terrified of the planning process, which can be just this big monster they don’t know how to navigate,” he says. “People have been renovating these derelict properties for years before the grants ever came in, and they’re devastated. They missed these 50 and 70 grand budgets – for a lot of people, that can be up to half or a third of their total bill.”

We walk up a laneway where the week’s course-group has spent a morning working on truss construction. Snuffles, a charismatic French bulldog Kidney adopted from the Dogs Trust, comes along for the trot. The body of the wood-framed house they have constructed stands nearby. The room is bustling with activity: sawing, hammering, and building instructors standing over the clients.

Creating moulds on the concrete casting weekend course. Photograph: Common Knowledge

Kirsty Hourigan happened upon Common Knowledge after “doing mad googling”. She has a background in metal fabrication, so has a reasonable degree of know-how and confidence. And she is clear why she is here.

“I want to build a small house. A tiny house. In the Outer Hebrides. But building a house was a bit intimidating.”

By day four, she is confident she has found what she needs here. “The course is broken into modules that make the information easy to think about. Really well designed. A lot of hands-on experience. It has given me the confidence and the ideas to do it myself.”

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It’s raining softly and steadily at lunchtime when everyone troops into the kitchen. It’s a casual buffet with a terrifically imaginative menu; nettle soup, aubergine, salad, homemade breads. The course throws strangers together, encouraging them to eat and talk about their experience. For some, that presents a challenge, particularly after the habits of isolation and distance acquired through the pandemic. Kidney remembers coaxing one customer who believed they had made a terrible mistake as soon as they arrived at the main building. Within 48 hours, the same person was thriving and delighted.

A student making a stool to take home, as part of the furniture design weekend course. Photograph: Common Knowledge

“It’s kind of a sense among people that there must be more to life,” says Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, the award-winning creative entrepreneur who sits on the board.

None of us own Common Knowledge. We’re members of the company rather than shareholders. That’s what is important about this project —   Fionn Kidney

“It is unusual to have four co-founders, and it is at the heart of their collective approach. It is a belief in the power of community. The spirit of it is: if we all come together and believe that this kind of world is possible where we help each other and learn from each other, it is a totally different way of doing things from the business paradigm. And while the co-founders are working so hard, there is a whole crew of instructors and volunteers and the board. It is basically a gathering.

Learning to work with steel on the weekend Introduction to welding course. Photograph: Common Knowledge

“People have been really burned by a system where it is all about working and being individual. That sense of isolation. And getting really worn out. And not being able to afford anything, either. Being disempowered. The new generation is not really accepting that. This challenges that whole system to say: ‘What if we believed we are capable of so much more as people?’ There have been amazing examples already of people who did the course and then turned up to help others on the course to build their extension. That is the spirit of it.”

Not everyone who attends the school will attempt to build their own home. But they’ll be articulate in the language of building, and might hire direct labour, saving inestimable sums. At the very least, it takes the mystery out of home building. “Not everyone will be a great cook,” Gardner points out. “But everyone should be able to make themselves a basic meal.”

Learning to use power tools at the build school. Photograph: Common Knowledge

If all of this sounds impossibly idealistic and worthy, so be it. Kidney and Gardner’s open-hearted sincerity about the project can make them seem like innocents almost, given that property and house-construction in Ireland was something akin to a get-rich-quick-racket built on Ponzi scheme principles. In purely commercial terms, Common Knowledge is a smart idea, and the co-founders are able operators. It’s a neat twist on the old “build it and they will come” adage. In Kilfenora, the invitation is to come and build it.

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They broke even last year, and it’s not difficult to imagine the venture quickly becoming profitable. But while Kidney and Gardner have hurled themselves into this project with the zeal of entrepreneurs (“They are never not doing this” another staff member said), they have structured the company in a way that places it immovably at the heart of the local community. They essentially pay themselves a wage and that’s it. That comes as a surprise to many of their guests.

“When we talk about being a social enterprise, people don’t necessarily know what that means,” Kidney says.

A build school group following a week spent learning to renovate a stone cottage. Photograph: Common Knowledge

“Yes, we’re mission-driven. Our mission is focused on supporting people to live a truly sustainable home life. The type of organisation we’ve set up here is a company limited by guarantee, rather than a limited company, and essentially means that there’s no private shareholders. None of us own Common Knowledge. We’re members of the company rather than shareholders. That’s what is important about this project. Essentially, we’re sending it off so that it can become its own self-supporting sustaining organisation, where all the profits are reinvested and providing for the impact of our mission among people, on the planet. Even in the acquisition of this property, that property essentially goes into a trust. It will never belong to me or Harrison. I don’t think it’s acceptable any more to set up a business that has no regard for people or the planet. Business needs to change.”

That an Irish person would knock down a stone cottage that was built 150 years ago here – like that’s… that’s Ireland’s history —   Harrison Gardner

Given the broad story of 21st century construction in Ireland – billions written off after daft ventures, lunatic price rushes, a shameful homelessness crisis – Kidney’s vision is a stinging riposte to it all. And there are many like him. Clare has become a destination point of a kind of Oregon Trail for a generation choosing to quit the cities. Ennistymon is thriving, and nearby towns are beginning to see new arrivals. Gardner and Kidney are convinced that the combination of remote working and necessity will bring about a revitalisation of west of Ireland localities – particularly those on the coast. They are convinced, too, that there is a resistance movement starting; to the old ways, to the acceptance of the three bed semi-D, to visualising a home that is affordable. Dreamy? That’s for you to decide. As Gardner warns, there’s a message in the lonesome structures with the caved-in roofs and unlit fireplaces which span the west of Ireland countryside.

Participants inside a structure they built on their week-long course. Photograph: Common Knowledge

“We just need to keep ourselves open to the changes that are coming, the developments in materials, the inventions people are coming up with; these incredible things we’re learning and solutions we’re finding to our problems. But also, to keep looking backwards at the buildings that have really stood the test of time. In Ireland, that’s these stone ruins. It’s heartbreaking to me. They’re not even my history, but that an Irish person would knock down a stone cottage that was built 150 years ago here – like that’s… that’s Ireland’s history. That’s the construction history of how homes were built here. And it doesn’t need to be restricted to museums. It can be, like, in our homes and part of our life. That would be like relegating the language just to a dictionary and not actually speaking it. If we don’t practise the things that have been practised here for generations, then we will lose them. And they will just become ideas. And things we talked about in school.”

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Inside RTE star Harrison Gardner’s stunning home bought for TINY price & his tip to cut decade off mortgage

• Nicola Bardon
• Published : 14:18, 26 Oct 2022
• Updated : 14:19, 26 Oct 2022

TAKE a sneak peek inside new RTE star Harrison Gardner's stunning abode - which set him back just €120,000.

The Australian builder , who's set to become a household name as his Build Your Own Home TV show kicks off, reckons Irish people are throwing money away on work they could do themselves.

Gardner, who travelled the world working as a builder for years, settled in Co Clare when he realised he could afford a decent plot of land with its own cottage.

He said being able to buy land was a change from the situation Down Under - where land can be extremely expensive.

He spent €81,000 on the five acres of land and the 200-year-old cottage sitting on it - and a further €40,000 on sorting out the electrics and plumbing to get it to a decent living standard.

Harrison told The Irish Sun last year: "I bought my cottage here for €81,000 with five acres. I added an extension.

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"Refitting the electrics and plumbing cost €40,000 so for €120,000, I have a very comfortable, very liveable home that was an old stone ruin built more than 200 years ago."

The house - where Harrison is based with wife Erin and daughter Inari - boasts a beautiful wood-framed extension that sits pretty in the stunning Clare landscape.

And inside, the finish is just as impressive with stone features across a split-level living space that features a wood-burning stove and plenty of light wood throughout, as well as lots of plants.

But while Harrison knows that he's at an advantage as a builder by trade, he reckons people could cut a decade off their mortgages by honing their own basic skills.

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And since moving to Ireland, he has been doing a side gig, holding building workshops to show what people can do without a contractor.

The Aussie told us back in 2021: "What I found, especially here in Ireland, is people feel very disconnected to buildings and that is disempowering to them.

"A lot of people say they wouldn’t even feel able to do very minor maintenance like changing a tap or fixing a hole in the wall."

And Harrison said 70 per cent of people on the sold-out courses are women under 30 who want to show they don’t need a man for DIY.

He insisted: "Guys have been brought up to think they’re meant to know this, that they can’t go and learn it, they need to instinctively know how to build.

"Whereas young women have been told they are not meant to build, it is not a job for them and someone will do it for them — and their rebellious Irish spirit is a lot stronger than being told that!"

TAKING AWAY THE FEAR

He added: "With people who come to the course, it is incredible watching the transformation.

"At the start they are too scared to stand close to a tool and by the end of the six days they are a complete master, joining wood together and not feeling the fear.

"Building is not hard but it takes a little bit of time to get the skills.

"But when you think of the irony, instead of learning to build, we pay a construction company for that service, which adds 15 to 20 years onto our mortgages, all because someone else built it for us.

"But if we spent six months to a year and built it ourselves you could cut a decade off your mortgage."

Harrison has been snapped up by RTE for a new show called Build Your Own Home, where he will share his skills and help people to build or renovate their home on tiny budgets.

He said last year: "This TV thing is very new for me, it was never part of the plan. But in the end, I get to help people who need it.

"Most can’t afford a €320,000 mortgage. There’s no way I could afford it.

"I think there are loads in this demographic, and I really see this as a way to break this cycle of huge mortgages and decades of repayments.

"Just by teaching people how you can do a lot of the work yourself, you can halve the costs and then subcontract the essentials like electricians, plumbers."

Harrison's new series follows the trials and tribulations of homeowners from across Ireland as they take on the mammoth challenge of building or renovating their own home - all under his watchful eye.

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Viewers will get to see progress unfold across a brand new build in west Cork, a Midlands cottage doer-upper, a Limerick farmhouse renovation and a Dublin extension.

• Build Your Own Home kicks off on Wednesday October 26 on RTE One at 9.35pm.
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THE WORLD'S LARGEST MAN

by Harrison Scott Key ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015

An uncommonly entertaining story replete with consistent wit and lethal weaponry.

Oxford American humor columnist Key (English/Savannah Coll. of Art and Design) pens a memoir about his father, a man with “the emotional tenderness of a Soviet farm tractor.”

As a boy, the author was partial to sock puppets, calligraphy, and poems tapped out on an electric typewriter. Even so, “Pop” attempted to teach his son all the necessary outdoor skills so important to a growing boy, including contact sports, fishing, fighting, and the frequent employment of firearms to “kill shit.” (In a “Note to the Reader,” the author writes, “I have changed the names of many characters…because most of those people own guns.”) Those were the pertinent and suitable activities for boys coming of age in the environs of Coldwater, Mississippi. Key’s relationships with his loving mother, a badass elder brother, and, eventually, a beloved wife and cherished children all connect with Pop and the author’s position as the strange scion of a big man with a huge head on a red neck. The author eventually evolved from a blameless, scared kid to an innocent, scared adult as he learned the odd joy of danger and how to wear a bow tie. Pop evolved, as well, as the paterfamilias who learned to disregard his instinctive rule for human contact: men over here, women over there. Key had his basic training in American civilization, particularly as practiced in the not-so-long-ago South. His spouse supervised such matters as babies—how to make them, diaper them, and raise them—though she is never mentioned by name. Forget the touch of Jean Shepherd, the satire of Gary Shteyngart, or the dash of Dave Barry; Key’s talent is all his own, and it is solid. Consistently seasoned with laughs, this memoir is adroitly warm and deep when it is called for.

Pub Date: May 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-235149-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Harrison Scott Key

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

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

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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.

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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A Book Critic as Wild for Food as He Is for Literature

“The Upstairs Delicatessen,” a memoir by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, traces his life’s twin passions.

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By Jennifer Reese

Jennifer Reese, the author of “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter,” is a freelance writer and critic.

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THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading | By Dwight Garner

Pity the freelancer tasked with reviewing for The New York Times the intimate and joyful new memoir by the esteemed Times book critic Dwight Garner. Unqualified praise in these pages for “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” will never be entirely trusted. Fortunately, after my third reading of Garner’s eccentric bricolage of literary anecdote and autobiography, I did come up with a few qualifications.

First, not everyone is going to enjoy this book. I can list the people in my life, all skinny, who will see no appeal whatsoever in strolling down the aisles of Stop & Shop with a free-associating book critic “in sweatpants and a moth-eaten cardigan and flip-flops.” My second qualification: Those of us fascinated by Garner’s thoughts on apples (he always looks for Cox’s Orange Pippins, because they’re the only kind an Iris Murdoch character eats) and Émile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” (“Western literature’s great groceries novel”) will wish he’d made a longer trip.

Garner valorizes an unpretentious and hungry way of reading and living that, although it is deeply familiar to me, I’ve never seen described with such candor and specificity. He’s divided his freewheeling book into six chapters: breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinking, shopping, and an interlude about swimming and napping. I downed it all in one greedy swallow and wanted more.

Garner grew up in West Virginia and Florida, raised on, as he puts it, the “Cool Whip side” of the cultural and gastronomic chasm that began to yawn in the 1970s. Anyone who was a child at the time will know what he means. In some ’70s kitchens you found carob chips and an earth mother steaming brown rice. In others, Hydrox cookies and Jell-O carried the day. Such was the kitchen of Garner’s childhood home, and he lovingly recalls suppers of “sauerkraut with sliced-up franks; spaghetti with fried ground hamburger and a sauce made from Hunt’s canned tomatoes, served with a gleaming green shaker of Kraft grated Parmesan cheese.”

Given the tenderness Garner lavishes on shelf-stable powdered cheese, it is no surprise that he was a chubby boy. His descriptions of his body constitute some of the sweetest and funniest passages in the book. “I was a soft kid, inclined toward embonpoint, ‘husky’ in the department-store lingo,” Garner writes. “If I’d been a cat, my undercarriage would have swayed while I walked. … Everyone else was thin and tall, like bottles of German wine.” (Well, not quite everyone, buddy.)

Garner’s early appetite for everything from Bugles to blue crabs was matched by his equally wide-ranging appetite for literature, encompassing Miami Herald sports columns, scavenged copies of Oui magazine and the novels of Robert B. Parker. He tells of returning from school, fixing a sandwich “sodden with mayonnaise, cheese slices poking out like a stealth bomber’s wings,” and settling in under the ceiling fan for three or four hours of bliss. He would eradicate all traces of his activities by the time his father, who “would have preferred to see his son outside in shoulder pads,” came home.

What’s refreshing here is that Garner never problematizes his eating and reading habits; they were and remain the engine of his vitality. Pretzels and Calvin Trillin books didn’t serve as a numbing mechanism or an escape from life; they were an extension and intensification of life. He was, as he puts it, an “omni-directionally hungry human being” and he read not to escape — or to please English teachers — but to mainline illuminating data about the glittering world and glean clues on how to be a person in it.

“I’ve looked to novels and memoirs and biographies and diaries and cookbooks and books of letters for advice about how to live , the way cannibals ate the brains of brilliant captives, seeking to grow brilliant themselves,” Garner writes. The lessons he learned were largely lessons in cultivating gusto. His heroes are “people who liked to tuck into life,” such as the rumbustious characters in the novels of Jim Harrison, zesty and unpretentious, who relish “game birds and truffles but are just as happy to find a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli.” Garner himself likes to tuck into life, but he comes across as a relatable and domesticated carouser, a bon vivant who regularly goes on diets and appears happiest at home with his family, a stack of cookbooks, his 900-song Sonos playlist and a Gordon’s gin martini.

Books serve many purposes and one of the purposes they’ve served in Garner’s life is as goodie bags. It is our good fortune that he likes to share. This book is packed with anecdotes and quotations from his decades of reading, but it also abounds in actionable recommendations and opinions that — if you are a suggestible reader — will occupy you for months.

I am the most suggestible reader you could ever meet and now own two bottles of Garner’s hot sauce of choice (Marie Sharp’s, an incendiary elixir from Belize), have made his most beloved sandwich (peanut butter and pickle), read a George Orwell essay on how to make tea (“among the best things this vastly intelligent and earthy man wrote”), devoured a cracked but fascinating Q. and A. (“one of the great interviews of the new century”) with the novelist Gary Shteyngart in the magazine Modern Drunkard, and ordered a copy of “The Theory and Practice of Lunch,” by Keith Waterhouse (“a copy belongs in your back pocket”). A dozen more action items from the book are on the horizon and I couldn’t be happier.

One final qualification: Occasionally Garner shoehorns in a quotation or anecdote too many. Does Jessica Mitford’s mother’s comment that giving birth feels like having an orange forced up your nostril really enhance Garner’s meditation on a supermarket citrus display? Perhaps not. But this excess of enthusiasm, this desire to cram in one more excellent line, even if it doesn’t quite fit, underscores the book’s ethos of gusto. Garner is like an irrepressible host who loads a final tempting dish onto the groaning board, saying, I know, this is Thanksgiving, but you’ve just got to try these gyoza, aren’t they great?

Yes they are. For those of us who live to read and eat, this book is a feast.

THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN : On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading | By Dwight Garner | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 244 pp. | $27

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