A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power...
The aspirational story of a young African-American woman’s rise from poverty.
“I considered myself fortunate, but in no way exceptional.” So, toward the end of her memoir, writes Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest executive director Mason of finding herself safely in academia and away from the fraught streets of the inner city. Getting there, she remarks, was a “herculean” matter of working past a host of obstacles—including, she suggests, the whole welfare establishment—that have been set up as if to make sure that children like her do not leave the ghetto for better lives. She levels the charge with such reasonableness that it seems unobjectionable, but of course, her memoir reveals her to be exceptional indeed. Even so, being exceptional, it seems, is not enough: in our Horatio Alger–like conception of wealth and poverty, we imagine that hard work, ambition, and perseverance will see us through and that poor people are that way by choice. Mason puts the lie to such notions, though she also provides ammunition for those who condemn generational welfare with her portrait of her mother, adept at working the system while making money on the side in the drug trade. (At the same time, her mother emerges as a good citizen of a kind, taking care of those even less fortunate.) A key for escape from poverty, by Mason’s account, is education. More than that, there is the kind of social encouragement that her white peers seem to enjoy, with their “different way of being in the world, entitled and less fearful.” Though without that cloying sense of entitlement, Mason’s memoir also proves the power of assertive networking, for once she figured out that others were in positions to help her, she wasn’t shy of asking.
A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power of hope and the institutional changes needed to make hope possible.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06992-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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