A candid tale of survival as a woman and a member of an ethnic minority.
Raw, folksy memoir by a woman who migrated from Uzbekistan to Russia and made a good life for herself and her family.
Bibish’s digressive first-person narrative reads like the transcript of an oral history, full of amusing, offhand anecdotes but without a clear shape or form. Her chatty, vernacular approach has its shortcomings, but also considerable charm. “I will tell you my story to unburden my heart a little,” she begins like a modern-day Moll Flanders, instantly winning over the reader. Born sometime in the 1960s to a large, impoverished family in the harsh region near Khiva, she was named Hadjarbibi in honor of her great-grandfather’s pilgrimage to Mecca and grew up under strict Muslim rules. When she was eight, three men abducted her from the side of the road, drove into the desert, raped her and left her to die. She managed to return to her village, though she did not reveal what had happened. As a teenager, she was again picked up and gang-raped, this time by men she knew, and again she suffered in silence. Leaving her stifling hometown became a priority; she studied hard at school and earned money folk dancing on regional television and as an extra in movies, to the horror of her conservative Muslim neighbors. She eventually married Ikram, a well-off young man from Turkmenia (it was his mother who shortened her name to Bibish), and the couple migrated to Russia in search of a better life. The memoir’s final section dwells on the hardships they underwent to establish themselves in a town near Moscow: discrimination, the bullying of their older, dark-skinned son, difficulties finding an apartment, eking out a meager living as traders in the market. Given all that Bibish has survived, readers may be skeptical of the author’s portrait of herself as a silly rube without common sense.
A candid tale of survival as a woman and a member of an ethnic minority.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7050-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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