An elegiac testament to friendship, love and survival.
An original, deeply moving memoir about how a man's quest to understand the supernatural led him to confront his own haunted past.
Writer and NPR executive Nuzum was a young teenager growing up in Ohio when he encountered his first ghost, a little girl in a blue dress who appeared to him in his dreams. As he grew up, the author became convinced that the girl “was a harbinger of my own self-destruction.” Perhaps she was. By the time Nuzum was 18, he was a “doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess” who actively courted suicide. His bizarre, sometimes violent behavior eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. When medical intervention failed, a beautiful and unconventional friend named Laura helped pull him back from the brink. But as he healed, their complex, enigmatic relationship faltered; soon he lost track of her altogether. Then, during his first year back at college, he received word that Laura had died after getting hit by a car. Although Nuzum moved on with his life, he remained permanently marked by his experiences. Closed doors still frightened him because they could “have ghosts hiding behind them.” Determined to confront his fears, he began investigating famous haunted places across America. His occasionally humorous encounters with the spirit world did nothing to cure his phobia, but they did push him into a reckoning with his past and with the ghost of Laura.
An elegiac testament to friendship, love and survival.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34243-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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