There is truth in Schickler’s pain and happiness, which makes for an engaging, relatable story that is a pleasure to read....
A memoir focusing on the passage from boyhood to manhood and from confusion to understanding.
Fiction author Schickler (Sweet and Vicious, 2004, etc.) tackles the truth of his own life and the path he traveled through religion, confusion, depression and women to accomplish his goals. From early childhood, the author felt a visceral pull to God and the religion with which he was raised, Catholicism. Even as a child, Schickler wanted to be a priest, to bring God to the world in a real way, but the church often felt too unrealistic and too “bubbly-safe.” Then there were the girls. His adolescent desire for neighborhood beauties turned into a romantic, sexual longing for women everywhere he went. Schickler wrestled with the tension of his two desires all the way through college and into graduate school before he finally found his answer. It didn’t come easily. Plagued by depression and injury, he continued his search for truth and for a life that could make sense for every part of his heart. He believed in a God within darkness, and he ably shows in his exploration how that dark edginess is mirrored in the human condition. In this memoir, it isn’t the devil in the details, it’s all the ways that Schickler understands or doesn’t understand his God, the beauty of shadows on wooded paths and in human hearts. The author’s struggle is at once universal and unique, gritty and holy.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-645-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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