This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.
A “lost boy” of Sudan and a California housewife forge a bond in this compelling dual memoir.
Deng and Bernstein (co-authors: They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan, 2005) met in San Diego just a few weeks before 9/11, brought together by the International Rescue Committee. They each experienced a process of acclimatization: Deng wrestled with what it meant to live in America, while Bernstein struggled with assumptions of her own. The book is written as a back-and-forth text, interspersing chapters in both voices to create a sense of conversation. It’s an effective strategy that helps readers understand on a visceral level the gap between these two very different sensibilities and the accommodations required on every side. Bernstein, for her part, can be funny; early in the book, she describes a humorous scene in which her son, Cliff, introduced Deng and two fellow refugees to the soda machine at a fast food restaurant. It’s a small moment, but it highlights a major issue: the difficulty of adapting, or moving, between two vastly different worlds. For Deng and his fellow refugees, America was the land of opportunity. “The poorest man in America is like the richest in Africa,” he was told. Beset by parasites, trying to adjust to working in a supermarket, he was confounded at nearly every turn. For Bernstein, the challenges were different: to see and interact with Deng, on his own terms. “They needed an advocate,” she writes. “A huge learning curve lay ahead for all of us.” The narrative traces the arc of that collective shift. Although it occasionally gets bogged down in the detritus of daily life, it is an important reminder of all we share as human beings. “Being a refugee,” Deng writes, “can feel like an invasion of another nation’s economy, resources, culture and space….I understand those feelings because as a refugee I am a person whose own way of life was violated in my native land.”
This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982546-22-9
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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