A former clinical psychologist, Gildiner is also a gifted storyteller. With verve, she relates how she cleverly manipulated...
This sequel to Too Close to the Falls (2001) picks up the story in 1960 with the willful, exuberant 12-year-old author entering adolescence and exiting small-town Lewiston, N.Y., for a new life in a Buffalo suburb.
A former clinical psychologist, Gildiner is also a gifted storyteller. With verve, she relates how she cleverly manipulated her way into the popular girls’ clique in high school, how she nearly burned down the doughnut shop where she worked and how her plan to paint the neighborhood lawn jockeys white went awry. She also writes about her disappointment when bad acne kept her, a talented athlete, from making the cheerleading team. In one grim episode, she and a girlfriend spied on a fraternity meeting, becoming stunned witnesses to a gang rape. In the second half of the book, the author chronicles her college years in Ohio—coping with roommates, making friends and encountering sororities, which at first she was determined to join, but which she soon characterized as bastions of a social conservatism that she abhorred. This experience and her observations of racial discrimination politicized the author. Gildiner’s summer job with a state welfare department opened her eyes to a malfunctioning system, and her romantic relationship with a somewhat elusive black poet and her work with civil rights brought her into contact with the black power movement. Disillusionment followed, and a scary brush with the FBI prompted her to accept a professor’s offer to help her get away from Ohio and into the University of Oxford. Throughout, the author examines her fraught relationship with her father, to whom she had been close as a child. It was his criticism of her flirtatious behavior with a boy that shaped her skeptical attitude toward boys throughout her high-school years and probably later still. But when her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and began to lose his mind, Gildiner stepped in to protect him from himself. The author’s relationship with her mother, a superficially conforming prefeminist, seems sympathetic but somewhat unclear.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02205-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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