There are points when the writing veers from emotional into overly sentimental. However, Castillo succeeds more often than...
A memoir of a writer—single, bisexual, mother, feminist—and her thoughts on social injustices, culture, and families.
In the introduction, poet and novelist Castillo (Give It to Me, 2014, etc.) acknowledges that her specific combination of self-descriptors could cause many readers to “come away from this book feeling that my stories have nothing to do with your lives.” Certainly, many readers approach memoirs with the idea of that being a positive aspect—to immerse oneself in the experiences and travails of somebody different, to escape oneself—and the author ably explores the intersections between shared experiences and personal, unique experiences. The details of her forebears' histories serve as keys to unlocking her present. She writes of her struggles with childhood poverty and the many obstacles that her family had to face on a daily basis. The author focuses on her aunt Flora, who, despite hardship—or perhaps because of it—found positivity in all things, displaying a vibrant, extroverted personality. Castillo's mother, on the other hand, was quiet and reserved. “My mother,” writes the author, “from whom no doubt I acquired the somber manner that has so often been misinterpreted as aloofness, was so different from her only sister.” Castillo describes a childhood and young adulthood spent moving among Mexico, Chicago, and elsewhere, pursuing education, love, and a growing sense that writing could provide a way to make sense of her life and the difficulties faced by a nation with many cultures living side by side. It is a high-wire act to bring together a combination of personality characteristics and specific cultural touchstones and make it resonate with a wider readership, but the author handles it well.
There are points when the writing veers from emotional into overly sentimental. However, Castillo succeeds more often than she fails, and her book provides a compassionate look at those crossing points in our shared lives.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55861-923-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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