Feiler tackles personal hardship with inquisitive and heartfelt eloquence.
After being diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Feiler (America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story, 2009, etc.) asked his closest male friends to provide guidance, wisdom and love to his children, should he not survive.
The author chronicles the daunting process of enduring a life-threatening condition, creating an amalgam of travelogue, family album, personal memoir and portrait of a marriage. With the same measured, down-to-earth voice that distinguishes his popular explorations of historical landmarks and religious figures, Feiler describes the men in his life who have shaped him, including his father, both grandfathers and the men he chose to fill his fatherly shoes in case his extensive surgery and chemotherapy treatments proved unsuccessful. By reverently marveling at the achievements, sorrows and credos of his male role models, the evolution of his deepest friendships and his wife's courage, the author looks beyond his own lifetime, putting the struggles of the present into a philosophically astute and humble context. Through regular letters to loved ones, he offers snapshots of his “Lost Year,” bluntly recounting the ravages of aggressive procedures, the impact of his weakened state on his daily life and the moments of joy, connection and grace he still finds within the anguish. His contemplative candor, fortitude and wry humor come through in the simplest of phrases: “No one aspires to be the person who handles this kind of situation well.” Addressing his daughters, the author writes about “the great paradox of parenting: Even as we come to feel we can’t live without you, our primary job is to prepare you to live without us. Our task, in a sense, is to make ourselves obsolete.”
Feiler tackles personal hardship with inquisitive and heartfelt eloquence.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-177876-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
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