Having no apparent direction, beginning or end, Fusselman’s freewheeling memoir is alternately serious and trivial,...
Musings on the nature of time, the relationship between victim and victimizer, parenting, alternative healing therapies and any other aspect of her life that strikes the author’s fancy.
Fusselman (The Pharmacist’s Mate, 2001) writes in short paragraphs, some only a sentence long, and groups them together into semi-chapters, each headed by the figure eight. The number’s significance is not made clear, but it may represent repetition; the author writes of her experience as a figure skater in the 1970s, when she repeatedly practiced executing an eight on ice. Viewed from another angle, the figure could symbolize infinity. Fusselman, who speaks directly to the reader, is not inhibited by rules about writing; her mini-essays flow in whatever direction her mind chooses. When her editor finds one childhood incident unbelievable, she includes the editorial discussion that ensues, bringing the reader into the writing process. Her reflections, which could be entries in a personal journal, include references to her encounters with a pedophile when she was four, her reactions to sessions with a hands-on healer and her child’s sessions with a craniosacral therapist, her efforts to sleep-train her two-year-old son and her motorcycle-riding lessons. She also offers her thoughts on such abstractions as joy, reality, space and time. Her fixation with a song by the Beastie Boys, the lyrics to which she paraphrases at considerable length, may puzzle readers who are not into the group, but her interpretation of it as a complex piece of artistry is fascinating.
Having no apparent direction, beginning or end, Fusselman’s freewheeling memoir is alternately serious and trivial, entertaining and exasperating.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58243-368-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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