Taylor's third volume of Irish reminiscences (Quench the Lamp, 1991; To School Through the Fields, 1990) continues in a sunny vein as it evokes the history, landscape, and sometimes dotty citizenry of tiny 1960's Innishannon, where the author raised five kids, opened a guest house, and manned the local post office and grocery store. When Taylor, then an energetic young switchboard operator in Brandon, married the orphaned nephew of a pair of shopkeepers and moved with him to his hometown of Innishannon in County Cork, the locals greeted the bride with a joke and a smile but remarked among themselves that she might turn out to be a tad too flighty for village life. Set on the wooded banks of the Brandon River, Innishannon had once served the grand estates of wealthy British and Irish families, but 20th-century uprisings and industrialization had rendered it a small, sleepy hamlet whose residents knew every detail of each others' lives. To the villagers' relief, Alice proved more dependable than she at first seemed—helping out in the shop until she and her husband were able to turn a large house on the main street into a successful inn; raising four sons and a daughter; tending to the elderly; dabbling in the arts; and, always, noting down the whimsical tales told in the shop, the post office, and the church by Innishannon's hard- working carpenters, priests, grandmothers, and children. The result is a portrait of a placid, charming, and remarkably isolated Irish town—certainly a different Ireland than the war-torn land farther north. Sentimental but entertainingly so: the story of a village well kept and a life well lived.
Pub Date: March 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08919-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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