Hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author’s refreshingly complicated and insightful...
A memoir of a religious, gay black man coming to terms with his own nuanced achievement of the American dream in the new millennium.
The narrative opens in 1999, with the 12-year-old author waiting for the end, praying nervously in his grandfather’s evangelical church before the turn of the millennium: “Lord, please take me with You when You come. That is all I have to ask of God, and I will get my answer soon. It is 11:57.” When midnight passes without incident, the meaning of the book’s title becomes manifest. The son of a star quarterback, Gerald grew up on the poor side of Dallas, where he also excelled at football, and he soon moved on to the distant planets of higher education and elite society. As he writes, “I have been so many things along my curious journey: a poor boy, a nigger, a Yale man, a Harvard man, a faggot, a Christian, a crack baby (alleged), the spawn of Satan, the Second Coming, Casey.” The author deftly navigates through the events shaping those identities: the months of his first true romance, his time at Yale and Harvard Business School, where he earned a master’s degree in business and was a Rhodes Scholar finalist; Wall Street; and a stint in Washington, D.C., on the strong career advice to “be a special assistant to someone at the top.” Along the way, Gerald examines the subtext underlying the clashing realities of his experiences and observations. “[I was] a boy defined by his circumstances,” the author writes in nearly the middle of the well-paced narrative, “perhaps we all are—just seven billion Eves made from the rib of our Adam-circumstance—but why do we lie about it? Why don’t we want to believe it? Is it that it shames us to admit how limited our power is, how much we can submit—have submitted—to the things we did not choose?”
Hardly a by-the-numbers memoir, this is a powerful book marked by the author’s refreshingly complicated and insightful storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1420-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
PROFILES
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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