A luminous meditation on the past, the enigmas of family and the tangled mystery of love.
An elegant memoir about the author’s turbulent relationship with his erratic, irascible, alcoholic and otherwise maddening artist-mother—who could sometimes be nurturing, even smothering.
Novelist Antrim (The Verificationist, 2000, etc.) begins and ends with allusions to his mother’s death from lung cancer in 2000; along the way, Antrim reminds us of her illness and of his own responses to it, including a bizarre obsession with buying a new bed after his mother died. He could not settle on a brand or style, he harassed mattress mavens, he imagined that his mother was somehow inside the bed, reaching out to him. Antrim also chronicles the weird behavior of Mom’s laconic boyfriend, who believed he’d found a lost painting by Leonardo (he hadn’t) and a harrowing encounter with eccentric, drunken Uncle Eldridge, who seemed on the verge of raping the author, a teen at the time. He includes revealing stories as well about his father—twice married to his mother—some grandparents, some girlfriends and his own emergence as a reader. (As a boy, he favored Tolkien, Wells and Conan Doyle.) He describes a moment of sexual awakening at age 12, when he lay naked all night with an 11-year-old girl who was a family friend, and he paints a dazzling portrait of a white kimono his mother designed, a garment whose metaphorical significance Antrim explores at length. At the heart of all lies the mother, a woman who mystifies and enrages the author even as she approaches death.
A luminous meditation on the past, the enigmas of family and the tangled mystery of love.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-29961-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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