A somber, moving tribute to a life of ideals and struggle.
A beautifully crafted, searing memoir by the Chilean American writer about his dispersion and homelessness after fleeing the military junta of General Pinochet.
As a deeply engaged supporter of President Salvadore Allende, Dorfman (Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North, 2004, etc.) was banished from Chile when Pinochet seized power in 1973, assassinating the president and throwing the country into a convulsion of military repression and fear. Along with his wife and small son, Dorfman first sought refuge in Argentina (where he was born in 1942), then Amsterdam, Paris and finally the United States over the next 20 years—a bitter exile that defined and transformed him. A child of “perpetual wanderers”—his father, a communist, had been forced to leave Argentina with the family for Chile, then the U.S., before being hounded out during the McCarthy era—Dorfman was familiar with the miseries and loneliness of exile. He learned English early until his return to Chile at age 12, then immersed himself in the “language of insurrection,” Spanish. In exile, he used English to promote his lifelong pursuit to “vanquish silence” and expose the hideous human-rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship. Dorfman writes eloquently, even floridly, about his fiery early devotion to the peaceful socialist revolution of Allende, and that he and his starry-eyed generation were absolutely blindsided by the coup. In exile, his creative powers dried up (“What was happening to me, to us, was quite literally, unspeakable”), until he found courage in expression—his words would become “a territory where the dead could resuscitate.” Dorfman writes frankly of the morphing of his ideals, the seduction of America, the wariness with which he is regarded now by his Chilean compatriots and how he and his family decided not to stay in Chile when they finally returned in 1990.
A somber, moving tribute to a life of ideals and struggle.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-54946-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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