Looking for a riveting reunited twin tale? Stick with The Parent Trap.
Intriguing but clunky account of twins who found each other in midlife.
In 1969, two families in New York each adopted a baby girl who had been given up by a mentally ill birth mother. Neither the adoptive parents nor the girls themselves knew about the existence of a twin. More than three decades later, the younger sister, Schein, petitioned the adoption agency for information about her birth mother and learned about her twin. She quickly tracked down Bernstein, a married mom who led a calm, settled life and sometimes felt that her aimless, single sister wanted too much from her. Their attempt to forge an adult relationship was initially fraught, but eventually the two women settled into a comfortable friendship and determined to find out who their mother was and why they were separated. The most interesting sections of their joint memoir chronicle their detective work. It turned out that Schein and Bernstein were unwitting subjects in a very controversial study of twins reared in different homes. Trying to understand the study’s ethics and aims, the sisters traveled to numerous archives, tracked down the nonagenarian doctor who spearheaded the project and talked to other separated twins. Their book probes the nature-nurture debate and considers whether the findings of a study that lacked participants’ informed consent ought to be made public. Unfortunately, stilted prose sucks the life out of this promising material. Lacking individual character, Schein’s and Bernstein’s alternating first-person sections have the same trite, melodramatic voice, given to statements like, “I mourn for the abandoned orphan I once was.” The dialogue is especially unconvincing: “I realize now that yours is the heartbeat I’ve always missed,” Schein tells her sister.
Looking for a riveting reunited twin tale? Stick with The Parent Trap.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6496-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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