There are two wrecks in this strikingly candid memoir, and one reads with the fascination and horror of drivers rubbernecking on a highway. The first wreck is the car crash that lands the author’s parents in the hospital, her mother with 80 broken bones, her father in a coma. The second wreck is Shapiro’s own life—a life that for much of the book makes it hard to sympathize with her. At the age of 23, in the mid- 1980s, she is a cocaine-snorting, liquor-swilling, aspiring-actress babe and the mistress of her former best friend’s stepfather. Having dropped out of college, this product of an Orthodox Jewish home is kept in style by a boorish hotshot lawyer. He buys her furs, jewels, and sports cars, and she numbs her scorn for both him and herself with drugs and alcohol. One feels equal parts pity and revulsion that such an intelligent, beautiful young woman can live such a vapid and amoral life. Shapiro’s saving grace is that she is equally repulsed in retrospect, making no excuses for her bad behavior. And, with her parent’s horrific accident as a wake-up call, as Shapiro gains respect for herself, the reader gains respect for her, as well. The portrait of her family, and of her mother in particular, is as unsparing as her self-portrait—no airbrushing hides the ugliness of the anger that drives her mother: ’she is incandescent, lit from within by a rage she has carried all her life, and which, at the moment of the crash, became her life source.— It will force Shapiro to become estranged from her father’s family at the time she needs them most. Novelist Shapiro (Picturing the Wreck, 1996, etc.) too often settles for clichÇs when she is capable of evocative and original prose, but her story accumulates emotional power as a lost young woman finds her way back to normalcy and a sense of purpose.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45631-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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