Athill, a veteran London editor who 25 years ago published the autobiography of a black American militant, offers an engrossing account of their friendship—an account written with the same openness that apparently characterized an earlier memoir (After a Funeral, 1984—not reviewed). Hakim Jamal was born Al Donaldson in 1933 Boston. An unloved child, he was a wino at 12, an addict at 14, and a convict at 20- -until hearing Malcolm X turned his life around. Hakim, meanwhile, was immensely attractive to women. His one marriage (to a distant cousin of Malcolm's) lasted long enough to produce six kids; what ended it was his tempestuous affair with the actress Jean Seberg. Soon afterward, in 1969, he met Athill. They hit it off immediately. Looking past his rhetorical bluster, she found ``a touchstone for kindness and honesty.'' They became friends and occasional lovers; 14 years his senior, Athill felt a primarily maternal love (with a ``delicious'' whiff of incest). Then she noticed signs of craziness. Hakim really believed he was God, as did his love-blind English mistress, HalÇ. The heart of Athill's story here is an electrifying, 48-hour, three-way confrontation provoked by Hakim's return to the States; Hakim accuses Athill of possessing HalÇ's body, and Athill sees that Hakim's ``kind and loving madness'' has a frightening side (though her fear soon passes). Athill concludes that Hakim ``had an acute natural intelligence...increasingly confused by psychological disturbance''—a disturbance that led her to break off work on Hakim's second book (about Seberg). His downward spiral continued; his death, back in Boston, was violent and meaningless. Athill's charm, and her power, lies in her refusal to censor herself. Her partial self-portrait is unflinching; her portrait of Hakim is devastating. High-quality work that lights up the first list of this brand-new house.
Pub Date: March 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-883642-21-3
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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