Fans of Bennett know what to expect—bracingly good prose, a well-seeded laugh here and there and much food for thought.
A relentlessly self-aware memoir by Bennett (The Uncommon Reader, 2007, etc.), that most inward-searching of dramatists and autobiographers.
The English have a fine confessional tradition, but when writing about family, the potential for embarrassment seems to silence, or at least gentle, many a brave voice. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” Philip Larkin famously wrote, and while England was shocked, no one rushed to correct him.) Not so Bennett, who writes affectingly and fearlessly of his mother’s long, slow descent into dementia. Mam had had barmy days before, he writes, but that changed to depression. Eventually the depression began taking more severe turns, which had the effect of uniting the siblings in concern over her condition—“but when no immediate recovery was forthcoming we would take ourselves off again while Dad was left to cope. Or to care, as the phrase is nowadays.” But Mam’s spells inspire a quest, as the author examines his family’s past to understand his parents, and himself. Thus it is that he discovers Grandad, “bald as an egg,” who had suffered through an explosion in a gasworks that blew off all his hair. Bennett also remembers an eccentric aunt, determined and steely, “recounting the events of her day in Proustian detail,” a great lesson for a budding storyteller in how not to attempt to bewitch an audience. Then there’s his parents’ own discovery, well into adulthood, of alcohol, and not just the booze but the snacks to accompany it, “cocktail snacks, bits of cheese and pineapple, sausages-on-sticks, food that nowadays would come under the generic term of nibbles.” Unfortunately for Bennett, Dad passed on, Mam remembered nothing, and it was up to the author to be the conscience and memory of his little tribe—a duty he discharges forthrightly and elegantly.
Fans of Bennett know what to expect—bracingly good prose, a well-seeded laugh here and there and much food for thought.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-19192-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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