A tender and engrossing travelogue that fully embodies “what it means to be a man and a father.”
A father-son soul-searching expedition forms the heart of Boston-based writer Hennick’s moving memoir.
Nile was just 5 when his father decided to take him on a road trip to create lasting, significant memories. The firstborn son of the author, who is white, and his Haitian wife, Belzie, a middle school teacher, Nile had progressed from a tantrum-filled toddlerhood into a “sensitive, big-hearted kid, quick to fall in love with new people and places.” Together, they set out from Massachusetts on a 10-day road trip with “impossibly high” expectations, and they hoped to end up at the annual two-night rodeo in Hennick’s hometown of Maxwell, Iowa, a place he hadn’t visited since his teenage years. The trip was a fascinating exercise in parental patience for the author, who was chronically challenged with weight issues and excessive drinking. The narrative progresses day to day as Hennick effectively incorporates his adventures with Nile with personal anecdotes about the author’s relationship with Belzie, his experiences as a father, and his own family history (“divorce is the organizing principle”). Along the way, father and son grew closer through stirring and educational conversations about the racial politics of skin color and baseball history in Cooperstown, New York, as well as challenging swimming lessons. After reuniting with Belzie and his daughter, “Peanut,” in Chicago, they made it to Iowa; at this point, Hennick painfully lingers over the impact of his lackluster relationship with his errant, indifferent father. Still, he was able to maintain a cleareyed resolve. “I want to be for my children the father I never had: present, sober, responsible, hard-working, competent, loving, organized, attentive.” Parents will find a great amount of relatable material in Hennick’s affecting, often poignant memoir. “One day,” he writes, “all that will be left of me is what my children remember.”
A tender and engrossing travelogue that fully embodies “what it means to be a man and a father.”Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-888889-97-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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