A graceful, wonderfully written memoir that’s sure to please Ansay’s fiction fans—as well as readers of confessional and...
After four novels (Vinegar Hill, 1994, etc.) and one story collection, Ansay debuts in nonfiction with a thoughtful memoir of affliction and redemption.
Ansay trained throughout childhood and adolescence to become a concert pianist, but by the time she was 20 her ambition was thwarted by a paralyzing illness that left her unable to walk—or to play. Doctors were mystified by her condition, which may have had something to do with an on-and-off bout of strep throat but certainly wasn’t helped by a punishing routine of musical training. (“Injuries were commonplace,” she writes, “particularly among pianists, particularly among female pianists. A girl one floor down from me fractured her arm landing a Beethoven chord.”) Confined to a wheelchair for the past 15 years, Ansay has transferred her energies from music to writing, becoming a favorite of Oprah and midwestern booksellers alike. Her memoir touches on these matters, but it spends greater time exploring, with considerable grace and clarity, matters of the spirit. Purgatorial lessons such as hers are taught, she writes, because “God is simply testing you, testing the condition of your Faith.” As she revisits her own suffering, she recalls that of her mother, who grew up working in the fields before the age of seven but spent her Sundays singing in the choir. Though she occasionally slips into self-indulgence, Ansay shies from self-pity. Indeed, most of her madeleines are recalled in fine humor, as when she recounts her first childhood lesson in learning how to lie: “At school, if somebody asked what I’d had for breakfast, and I’d had eggs, I’d say, ‘Cereal.’ Why? Just because I could.” That’s an essential talent for a writer, of course, and Ansay has cultivated hers well.
A graceful, wonderfully written memoir that’s sure to please Ansay’s fiction fans—as well as readers of confessional and inspirational literature.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17286-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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
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
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