Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.
A daughter chronicles her journey to understand the complexities of silence, myth-making and taboo that have shaped her family’s history.
When Fanny Howe and Carl Senna wed in 1968, their interracial union was widely regarded in liberal circles as a symbol of the promise of their generation. The relationship, however, proved disastrous for both the couple and for their children. Novelist Senna (Symptomatic, 2004, etc.) portrays a home shaped by her parents’ abusive relationship and the legacy of their equally unhappy divorce. She provides harrowing details about growing up with an irresponsible, intermittently alcoholic father and a frequently impoverished single mother. At the heart of this personal history lies the author’s search for her roots—not her mother’s well-recorded descent from the founding families of New England, but her father’s multiracial Southern background and the evasions, half-truths and unspoken stories that defined it. In the course of unraveling the mystery of her father’s parentage and following the trail of his bloodlines, Senna squarely confronts the issues of race and ethnic identity in American history. Luminous prose carries along a narrative that might otherwise have failed to hold the reader’s attention. For all its revelations of buried family secrets, her memoir does not have a particularly strong story arc; on several occasions, for example, recollections are simply presented under the title “More fragments.” The result is a compendium of fascinating and perhaps deliberately unassimilated details, rather than a sustained narrative of satisfying self-discovery.
Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-28915-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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