Written with stylistic clarity and studded with family photos, Person’s lucid memories present a stirring scrapbook.
A former international model charts her unconventional childhood in the 1960s with a hippie-ish family.
Person begins with the lives of her progressively thinking maternal grandparents, a Korean War veteran and a baker’s daughter who used marijuana to soothe debilitating bouts of depression. That remedy found its way to the author’s mother once the family moved to California. Then, after a failed marriage, the family relocated to a “tumbledown house in a town just over the Canadian border,” where the author was born. Another move to the northern Alberta wilderness in the early 1970s further estranged the group from contemporary civilization; Person and her family gathered berries, laundered clothing in a river and slept in a ramshackle tepee. The author grew up with an appreciation for nature and for her grandfather “Papa Dick,” who expanded their camps to include visiting “free-love-and marijuana-saturated” transients interested in living the same unfettered lifestyle. Further moves to southern British Columbia and beyond with her mother’s new beau, Karl, eventually became stifling for Person as she came of age and preferred reuniting with her birth father to living with her pothead grandparents. While the author predominantly chronicles her eccentric childhood, in the final chapters, she details her independent ascent into the modeling world, where she bravely traversed the competitive fashion markets in Manhattan and Europe at age 15, alone, with barely an acknowledgment from her oblivious mother. Person also soberingly examines the myriad mistakes and struggles in her own adult life (“I cheated on my first husband with seven different men….I had done so much coke and drank so much booze that I had beat the crap out of my boyfriend”), mirroring her dysfunctional upbringing. Personal closure occurred with forgiveness and a rebonding with her mother years before her death.
Written with stylistic clarity and studded with family photos, Person’s lucid memories present a stirring scrapbook.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228986-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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