Lyrical and aching in all the right measures, a finely crafted piece of work distilled to its essence.
A strikingly elegant family history, shot through with a poet's appreciation of Hawaiian geology.
Done out of his inheritance by a ruthless stepmother, the author's father moved the family from Hawaii to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. It was a jarring dislocation, made still more unreal when Hongo's parents chose to shroud their Hawaiian days, and many family members, in secrecy. As a mainlander teaching poetry to college students, Hongo (The River of Heaven) felt the pull of Hawaii and the need to do some digging in the family archives. He and his wife and child take up residence in Volcano, Hawaii, where the Hongo Store once served the locals. Reacquainting himself with the island, the author takes long walks afield and is smitten by the volcanic landscape, a patch of living incandescence: "I was spellbound out there, suddenly in a world strangified...a kind of silvery ocean on whose waters I could walk.'' Relatives are met—some confrontationally—and Hongo pumps them for his family's history. Stories emerge, and he turns them lovingly in his storyteller's hand, catching their drift and finding their dignity (or lack thereof). Meeting the dastardly stepmother is a great moment, and so too is the tale of the marine, the shop clerk, and the grocer's revenge. The poet's own progress, riddled with fits and starts, gets special, and raw, consideration. Through it all, Hongo quests for "that governing story of a familial past,'' one that may explain his family's detachment and his own dispirit. He finds instead a "beauty in belonging to this earth and to its past, even one locked in mystery and prohibition, unstoried.''
Lyrical and aching in all the right measures, a finely crafted piece of work distilled to its essence.Pub Date: May 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-57167-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
