A quietly moving memoir.
A Nigerian-born Bangladeshi writer/photographer’s memoir about growing up in Nigeria and America and the inner turmoil she faced while coming to terms with her multicultural heritage.
In 1972, just a year after Bangladesh gained independence, Hoque’s (The Lovers and the Leavers, 2015, etc.) parents immigrated to Africa to live in the small town of Nssuka. The author was born soon after and became the family’s “Nigerian baby.” While her scientist father worked at the local university, Hoque grew up immersed in Nigerian culture and even gave herself an Igbo name, Ngozi. But political instability caused the family to leave Nssuka permanently when Hoque was 13. They settled in Pittsburgh, a city where Hoque’s father had once spent a sabbatical year and where her youngest brother was born. Her transition to the U.S. was traumatic, yet within six months of arriving, no one could tell that she had not grown up “in middle America, going to summer camp, and watching bubble gum TV.” Hoque excelled in school, just as her ambitious parents—and especially her father—desired. A breakdown in the middle of her doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business brought Hoque a greater awareness of the many personal, academic, and cultural stresses that had defined her life and her need to make sense of a fractured self. After a stint in an MFA program in San Francisco, Hoque traveled to Bangladesh, where she felt alienated despite the fact that “everyone looked like me.” Yet within this space of disconnection, she began to find healing, especially after her father’s revelation that he had once prepared for a literary career and even published a novel. Always aware of language and its limitations in fully fleshing out a life lived across cultures, Hoque charts a remarkably intercontinental journey of personal discovery while celebrating hard-won lessons of self-acceptance.
A quietly moving memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-9-35-177700-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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