A profoundly moving memoir.
The children’s book author shows masterful control in this memoir of a life careening beyond his control.
This is a sequel of sorts to Crawling: A Father’s First Year (2006), but it’s also a very different book. As Cooper writes of that book, “it’s short and upbeat, though there’s one sentence about not wanting to become the parent of a child with cancer that makes me suck in my breath.” In this short memoir, the author has become exactly what he didn’t want to be in that throwaway line. It starts with a “bump” on the first page, which Cooper happens to feel when his 4-year-old daughter is sitting on her father’s lap watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two pages later, the bump that he might have been tempted to dismiss has been diagnosed as “a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms’ tumor, a ‘good cancer,’ a funny pairing of words.” Two pages later, it is “stage three, which is not good.” Before the end of this chapter, the author has begun to “wonder if there are elements of this story that may get away from me.” He is right to wonder, for under this illusion of stylistic control lies a cauldron of powerful emotion that can erupt at any moment. And it does, to the author’s surprise at his own anger, which embarrasses him a little in retrospect and surprises readers, because the prose is so measured. But this is a book in which the subtlety of surface control sustains an exquisite tension with the turmoil beneath, as the author finds others “looking at a man who is a little unhinged.” His daughter is fine, for now, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and periodic scans. The changes in her are mainly the ones any girl might experience from the ages of 4 to 8. But her father is transformed into a writer who must leave “an angry island” and reconcile the world’s horrors with its ineffable beauty.
A profoundly moving memoir.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87123-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
PROFILES
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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