Author: Robert M. Katzman

Publisher: Fighting Words Publishing Company

ISBN: 0-9755279-0-8

The following review was contributed by: SHELDON (SHELLY) WAXMAN & click to view Shelly's reviews

Although Bob Katzman calls his book an autobiography, it really is a memoir. What’s the difference? An autobiography takes a person’s life from the beginning to the time of the writing. A memoir is a series of vignettes about a person’s life. Bob’s story encompasses sixteen separate memories.

            What drives a person to write a memoir? Having written one myself—“In the Teeth of The Wind—A Study of Power and How To Fight It”—I think I know the answer. It comes from a driving force within the mind for a release of the devils that cohabit there. They are stories that have to be told in order to rid them from the mind. Once on “paper”, the devils disappear.

            Unfortunately, when it comes to publishing a memoir (or whether to publish at all) one is soon confronted with the fact that most people don’t want to read the memoir of a “nobody”. It is unfortunate because even nobodies have good stories.

            Bob’s book is a series of disconnected human-interest stories that reveal the kind of person Bob is. He is left handed, as am I. Left handed people are different than right handers. We are stubborn, independent, see the world differently, and are always a little meshugah (crazy).

            Bob has had a difficult life. His mother physically abused him. What makes mothers do that I have always wondered? Father abuse is more understandable. Bob gives no explanation. Perhaps, there is no answer. He has gone through several businesses and has had many surgical procedures, starting at age eighteen for bone cancer of the jaw. He shows us that with chutzpah we can overcome the obstacles thrown in our way.

            Bob started early on as a Jewish teenage owner of a newsstand in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. As such, he daily had to confront the corruption that is Chicago. He does so and in this Volume I he is successful. On one occasion he is forced to enlist the aid from “one of the boys”—a member of Chicago’s Italian mob.

            Memoirs are always a little self-indulgent and Bob’s book has its moments too. But all in all, it is worth reading. It is always interesting to read the stories of real people to see how they act under stress. Bob is someone who has handled the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” with surprising resolve. Volume II is to be released in the spring of 2005.

You can find out more about Robert Katzman by clicking on his SITE