A nice memory piece.
A boy's way of life in the olden heartland of America, now largely gone, is expertly summoned again by a clever grown-up kid.
In a narrative voice that sounds like Penrod equipped with a few cuss words, Benjamin deftly depicts the world of kids (i.e., boys) and girls, of classmates and cousins, of bullies and sidekicks. It's Wisconsin in the 1950s and ’60s, and they are all blithely prepubescent. With scant commerce or conversation with grownups, the self-imposed rules of kidhood were strict and intricate. The Code's main feature: You are on your own—no kid help, no adult help. Motherly instruction had just two variants: “do your chores” (to which the appropriate reply was “awjeezma-a!”) or, alternatively, “go out and play.” And play this writer did. There was an adventure with a monstrous snapping turtle, a tussle with a crazy squirrel, giant fish to be caught, hurdles to leap, and flyballs to catch. Sandlot baseball, pickup football, and general scrambling all involved playground politics, artful and fraught with complexities. There were, naturally, mortal perils to boys' lives: tricky swimming holes, ice, tractors, polio, parents, mean old ladies with firearms, cops, and robbers. And, outfitted at the start with a papier mâché fielder's glove, a bamboo fishing pole, annoying siblings, and a talent for spelling, was our memoirist. There were Saturday movies and epic ball games with the kids from the Publics against the Catholics. Skinny Benjamin, the poor parochial school odd-kid-out from a broken home, strained mightily for school and Savior. We can see him, portrayed by Master Rockwell, fairly leaping off a Saturday Evening Post cover. His evocative memoir, part Patrick McManus and more Jean Shepherd, has enough fun and wit to play with either, last kid no more.
A nice memory piece.Pub Date: March 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50728-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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