Novelist See's (Golden Days, 1986, etc.) Dreaming is a searing memoir about drinking: about her family's relationship with alcohol—eventually, with drugs as well—and, more generally, about middle-class America's long love affair with intoxication. This clear-eyed anatomy of how addiction spreads across the generations is not for the faint-hearted. It probes painful regions of the soul that continue to obsess troubled Americans. It not only offers no cure, it offers no final argument against or for liquor. The first part of her memoir is the most compelling. See opens dramatically, painting an idyllic California backyard landscape in which a mother is beating a child. It is her mother, beating her. Exercising her considerable novelistic talents See vividly recreates her youth. She captures her mother's manifest alcoholic misery and her father's cheerful manner of masking his depression; the impact on all concerned of their divorce; and her stepparents' fascinating characters. See's own early marriages dissolve in liquor and dope-fueled scenes, as she and her father begin to move in an expertly outlined hippie milieu. See's sister Rose, meanwhile, long tortured by their mother, disappears into the wilderness of the drug culture. See devotes much space to transcribing Rose's experiences. These prove absorbing enough, but not quite in sync with See's own, despite what a late chapter title calls ``the embarrassing Californianness [sic] of it all.'' The bad times that See describes follow the patterns that obsess recovery movements (in fact, her father and stepmother were early AA adherents), but she refuses to let go of the good times, instead working heroically to cultivate a broad perspective that encompasses both. At a key moment, See claims that ``the second most boring thing in the world after people bending your ear about dreams is people bending your ear about their acid trips.'' But thankfully, with a resolute ``nevertheless!'' she tells of dreams, drinks, and trips all—proving herself exceptional for her brave storytelling, if not for her sobriety. Not the great American novel she and others in her family aspired to write—but a book that will nevertheless forever change how many of its readers imagine whatever the American dream might be.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43026-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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