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MAMA'S BOY

A STORY FROM OUR AMERICAS

A terrifically moving memoir of the myriad complexities of family dynamics.

An award-winning screenwriter’s journey from Texas Latter-day Saints roots to prominent LGBTQ activist.

At the center of this thought-provoking memoir, Black, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for Milk, offers a heartfelt tribute to Anne, his courageously inspiring yet deeply religious and politically conservative mother. Anne was raised in an impoverished family of sharecroppers in Louisiana. After contracting polio at age 2, she suffered through years of therapy and painful surgeries, leaving her reliant on leg braces and crutches for the rest of her life. Despite these physical disadvantages, Anne went on to marry and eventually raise three children, primarily as a single mother, while building a successful career. After enduring two abusive marriages, she found sustaining love with her third husband. The author’s life story follows a parallel path of meeting obstacles through resiliency. Though he was a shy and awkward child, Anne’s examples of her strong willpower motivated Lance to reach his own challenging goals, ultimately inspiring the necessary confidence to come out to his family at age 21. Though mother and son often held firm to their conservative and liberal viewpoints, each recognized positive attributes inherent in either camp. Lance discovered common interests with some of his Texas relations, and Anne gained a more compassionate understanding of the LGBTQ community. “Our house should have been divided—North vs. South, red vs. blue, conservative vs. progressive, coasts vs. mountain or plains, or however you choose to name such tribes,” writes the author. “Instead, my mom and I fueled each other. Her oil lit my lamp, and eventually mine lit hers. The tools I learned to wield growing up in her conservative, Christian, Southern, military home were the same ones I’d used to wage battles that had taken me…to the front row of the United States Supreme Court to fight for LGBTQ equality.” Black provides a wholly engrossing account of how a mother and son evolved beyond their potentially divisive religious and political beliefs to uncover a source of strength and unity through their enduring bond.

A terrifically moving memoir of the myriad complexities of family dynamics.

Pub Date: April 30, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5247-3327-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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