A flimsy biography of the phenomenonally successful black author. The questions that come to mind after reading Patrick’s book have more to do with the nature of biography than with the nature of Terry McMillan. Is biography simply well-put-together research? If that’s the case, then Patrick’s work fits the bill, since there are facts to be picked up herein, such as where McMillan grew up and went to school, how many brothers and sisters she has, what she did for a day job while writing at night, and various other mechanics of how she came to be the first black woman author to have both a bestselling book and a box office hit with Waiting to Exhale. However, if the genre requires insight or a convincing argument that the life of its subject is relevant to readers, then this unauthorized biography falls short in any number of ways. Patrick gets off to a bumpy start with a defensive and occasionally whiny introduction that explains why the biography is unauthorized, which contains the usual reasons of the subject not wanting her biography written just yet and thus not participating in its creation. As the book continues, McMillan’s objections seem well justified, for not only is there little to be found here that could not be gleaned by reading her novels and a few interviews with her, but also what is here is written in a format that seems more suited to the adolescent reader than to the adults who are its probable consumers. Sentences describing McMillan’s ambition (“Maybe she could only afford water, but that didn’t stop her from looking at the soda bottles and visualizing!”) make it hard to think of this successful author as anything close to a real person. Curiosity about Terry McMillan would be better satisfied by reading her books. (8 pages b&w photos, unseen).
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20032-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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