Graceful recollections of a privileged English childhood that was “directed by common sense as well as with love.” (15...
The fourth slim volume of memoirs (Stet, 2001, etc.) from the veteran London editor looks back on a mostly blissful English country childhood, concluding that early happiness is life’s best preparation for death.
Beginning with the passing of her mother (“that a woman of ninety-six was lucky enough to die an easy death without losing her wits . . . there was nothing much to mourn in that”), Athill, 85, offers a series of upbeat accounts of what it’s like to be “a mobile reservoir of experience” (“you can so easily let your mind drift”) before examining her first 17 years. The eldest of five children born to an upper-middle-class family in Norfolk, Athill offers lush, episodic recollections that drift over the flora and fauna surrounding her grandparent’s large country estate, touch on her real and imaginary adventures with siblings, her closeness with horses, and her sensitivity to the varying moods within the many rooms of her grandparents’ huge manor house, which she contrasts to the smaller but no less interesting farmhouse that her parents occupied. Things that could have been sources of trauma don’t become so here (a malignant “ghost” glimpsed during potty-training; a fussy French governess; a funereal doctor who mistakenly diagnoses her childhood coughs and sniffles as tuberculosis); nor do the exciting but carefully constrained fumblings of teenage love become anything more than momentary interruptions in a childhood rich with the rhythms of nature, the mostly kind, if occasionally incomprehensible, administrations of servants and teachers, and the aloof but unquestioned affection from parents. All these gave Athill a sense of self, and of place, before adult uncertainties intruded and, as she puts it, “the gates of Eden clanged shut.”
Graceful recollections of a privileged English childhood that was “directed by common sense as well as with love.” (15 b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-86207-484-4
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Granta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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