Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.
First-book author Barber recalls the suicide of one boyhood friend, the disintegration of another, his own experiences working with the homeless, mentally handicapped and mentally ill—and wonders why he’s been able to emerge from the tangled wood and others have not.
Barber (Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health/Yale Univ. School of Medicine) mixes affecting autobiographical anecdotes, self-deprecating humor, summaries of psychiatric cases and speculations about the meaning of life. He begins with his most powerful segment, the 1983 suicide of his close friend Henry, an act no one witnessed but that Barber imagines with great poignancy. (Later, he employs, to diminishing effect, the same technique in imagining the suicide of that same friend’s mother, who years later killed herself in the same remote location and fashion as her son.) Barber relates many stories about his school and collegiate days (he dropped out of Harvard, then returned and graduated), including some harrowing times when he watched Henry systematically destroy every object in his room. He also tells about his long struggles with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and his initially liberating experiences with Prozac, along the way offering some details about his parents and about his courtship and marriage. He sort of backed into the mental health profession by taking a job in a home for the mentally retarded, which led to his eventually working long hours at Bellevue and helping at homeless shelters. His wife’s pregnancy, he says, transported him from the shelters to the Ivy League. In closing, Barber observes that he and his close friends—all bright, all successful in school—might have struggled because they’d had to create their own war to fight, unlike the WWII and Vietnam generations, who were challenged by history more directly and profoundly. Some of the segments—especially the long case narratives—seem more tangential than essential.
Moments of undeniable power punctuate a sometimes disordered narrative.Pub Date: March 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-1298-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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