A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.
In this interview-based memoir with hints of a mystery, a man tries to get to the bottom of his mother’s troubled life.
Debut memoirist Glascoe opens his story at the nursing home where his mother, Maggie, is in the end-of-life stage with Alzheimer’s. He then begins his search of the past in their native Scotland and in Toronto, where Glascoe’s family had immigrated when he was still a child. In Scotland, his father, Bob, worked in the coal mines before and after his traumatic World War II service, while Maggie supported the family with factory defense work. Living close to the bone, it wasn’t a happy marriage, yet it lasted right up until Bob committed suicide and Maggie’s Alzheimer’s began to manifest. But had she been seriously unbalanced long before that? Glascoe gathers recollections from his estranged brother, his nephew, his daughter, his wife and others, probing what they remember and what they feel—anything that could shed light on the life of this passionate, intelligent but stymied and contentious woman. Memories conflict, and many of these people are in denial. Glascoe learns more about the family’s messy dynamics than he ever realized; in fact, it may all be a fool’s errand with no satisfying answers, and he may never truly know his mother and her dark motivations. In an ironic twist, the funeral home misplaces then “finds” her ashes, so Margaret McGregor Glascoe is as elusivea figure in death as she was in life. Aware and witty, Glascoe is a talented writer. The chapters adroitly toggle between his weekly visits with his mother in a Toronto nursing home and his interviews with everyone who might illuminate his search. The nursing home scenes can be rather depressing, and he captures that despair and absurdity perfectly. In an eloquent late chapter that could stand by itself, he reminds readers that Maggie was like most of us: We will never be famous or exceedingly celebrated, but we deserve to be remembered and loved.
A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491854037
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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