Gee provides interesting details on the changes in her outer world but not much depth or introspection on her inner growth.
In this coming-of-age memoir, Los Angeles–based journalist Gee examines her transformation from social-climbing material girl to loving mother after falling in love with a fellow journalist.
Born into a middle-class Chinese-American family, the author gleaned early on from her father’s losing battle with his financially obsessed brothers that material wealth paved the way to happiness. “All my life I had gotten the message that ‘making it’ meant being rich, pampered, and beautiful,” she writes. So she left the States after college to pursue her dream of “making it” as a features writer in Hong Kong, where she sparkled among the glitterati while being doted on by a British fund manager. But the trappings of that “swish, fragrant existence” began to lose their luster when the author met her husband-to-be, Ajay Singh, a “kind, handsome soulful man” who, after brief workplace encounters, wooed her from his home in India through old-fashioned correspondence. Six months after moving to Hong Kong to be with Gee and their subsequent engagement, Singh revealed that his family still lived in the childhood home built by his great-grandfather at the turn of the 20th century. Though having expressed no prior interest in meeting her future in-laws, within weeks of her fiance’s revelation, she sought to visit the “grand hundred-room” outside New Delhi. While much of the memoir’s narrative focuses on the reconciliation of contrasting worlds as Gee strove for acceptance by the Singhs, one wonders whether the capitalistic tendencies the author slowly disavowed represent the emotional truth of the period depicted here or are merely heightened for dramatic effect.
Gee provides interesting details on the changes in her outer world but not much depth or introspection on her inner growth.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-37878-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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