A tour de force.
Carey’s debut is at once an Irish home-reconstruction comedy, a requiem for Fire Island friends, and a treasury of Broadway gossip, all for the love of Mammie.
In the early 1960s, 12-year-old Alice and her mother sail to Ireland to visit relatives in County Kerry. There they find Mammie’s brother Bob, a pedophile priest; cow-milking cousin DD; bog fires, excellent tea, and good whiskey. They continue on to Father Bob's meager Liverpool parish and to London, the trip’s highlight. Forty years later, Carey and her husband sell their beloved Fire Island home off Long Island and buy a “ruin” near Bantry Bay, County Cork. The main narrative covers the repair of this pre-Famine building: architect, laborers, and neighbors appear on an unpredictable schedule; New York friends visit and travel to such local sights as the Skellig Rocks. Between commutes to Ireland, Carey remembers her Catholic childhood in Queens, maintaining the present-tense narrative that gives all of her memoir such immediacy. Keeping her pugnacious father in the background (and never calling him “Dad,” always Carey), she recalls struggling in school and sneaking into weddings with her mother. When Mammie is hired as housekeeper to Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple and, later, Jed Harris, life changes dramatically. Big Alice brings in Little Alice to help after school. They love the Manhattan good life: wonderful clothes, Christmas cards from Cartier, piles of sweets from East Side bakeries, all the showbiz gossip from Homer Poupart, Dalrymple's gay assistant. Carey's affection for Homer later leads to her summering in Cherry Grove, Fire Island's gayest community. Harris, a heart of gold behind the ruthless facade, provides Alice with front row seats for Peter Pan, and helps her switch to a first-rate high school, where she does well. The sentimental subtitle belies a powerful, earthy, affectionate story whose disparate sections are knit together by Carey’s skillful characterizations, authentic dialogue, and witty observations.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60984-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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