Straight from the confessional—one hopes the writing was cathartic, because it’s awfully painful reading.
Former TV-show creator and producer Barris (Who Killed Art Deco?, 2009, etc.) offers “snapshots” of his daughter’s doomed life.
Della Barris died at the age of 36, undone by alcoholism and drug addiction. She had been indulging, as far as the author knows, since she was 11. It may have been a genetic problem, but Barris is the first to admit that he could have done a lot more to nurture his daughter. The author is unforgiving in his depiction of his and Della’s mother’s parenting—they were immature, self-involved and negligent, he writes. He believes their divorce shattered something in the young Della, and it certainly marks the beginning of his failure as a father. Della was bounced around from school to school, continent to continent, until she landed with her father, at his suggestion. He calls her mean, deceitful and duplicitous, and a “vicious” blackmailer when it came to his girlfriends. “I found the responsibility of caring for my daughter loathsome,” he writes, and one attention-calling episode after another finds him whining, “I didn’t know what to do about it.” Nor did he seek much advice, least of all from Della. The author abandoned her at age 16 to a trust account. After years of ill will, there was a rapprochement, but by then Della was a full-blown, HIV-positive addict, stealing from friends and prostituting herself.
Straight from the confessional—one hopes the writing was cathartic, because it’s awfully painful reading.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6799-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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