Novelist Lowry (Breaking Gentle, 1988, etc.) delivers a stunning work of nonfiction, charting the growth of a strange but healing intimacy between herself and a young woman prisoner sentenced to die for a gruesome murder. In 1988, Lowry was still in the state of numbness that had arisen four years earlier when her 17-year-old son Peter had died in a hit-and-run accident. Peter had been troubled, and in trouble, for years, and Lowry's grief was compounded by an obscure sense of guilt at somehow having failed him as a mother. Then she read about Karla Faye Tucker in The Houston Chronicle, her hometown paper. Karla fascinated Lowry with the contrast between her innocent prettiness and the horror of her crime—the motiveless, drug- impelled pickaxe murder of a hated acquaintance and his female companion. The luridness of Karla's background—she was a call-girl mom who taught her two daughters her trade and shot heroin with them—made her story even more compelling. Lowry requested an interview, and Karla agreed, beginning a series of monthly visits in which the women shared details of their respective tragedies, as well as a lot of plain old restorative girl-talk. That Karla is Lowry's substitute child, the one she can do right by to make up for her self-perceived failure with Peter, and that Lowry is the good mother Karla never had, is an unavoidable inference—but there is more to this complex relationship: a shared taste between Lowry and Karla for mystery and impulse, and a mutual amazement as to ``how much happiness you can find within completely unacceptable givens.'' Gripping true-crime details and marvelous local color in Lowry's rendering of the wild, heartless boomtown of Houston make this a real page-turner. But most remarkable is the author's insight into the human capacity for extremes of violence and tenderness, brutality and nobility.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41184-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
