Lerner’s welcome autobiography also makes a fine contribution to social history.
A spirited, eminently readable, and unapologetic memoir of leftist life in a rightist era.
A pioneer of feminist history and cofounder of NOW, Lerner (History, Emerita/Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Why History Matters, 1997, etc.) was born in Vienna just after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire following WWI. With sympathy and grace, she recalls her comfortable, bookish youth in the midst of a diverse family she describes with discernment: “Grandmama was a matriarch whose splendid intelligence and energy was entirely devoted to tyrannizing the household and any family members within her reach”; “if my father’s ideal was respectability, my mother’s was creativity.” Their civilized way of life would soon be destroyed by Nazism. When Austria fell to the German invaders, Lerner and much of her family managed to flee the country, and she came to America determined to be “an immigrant, not a refugee.” Shocked by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lerner, now working as a writer on the fringes of the film industry, determined “to live in opposition to government policy, wary of official pronouncements.” Affiliated with the communist party, she and husband Carl lived under the shadow of the anticommunist inquisition (to call that period the McCarthy era, she writes, gives too much credit to the senator from Wisconsin) and spent much of their time trying to slip under the FBI’s radar. Moving to New York, Lerner began to work on a novel about the abolitionist movement that set in motion her subsequent career as a historian and her eventual disillusionment with communist realities, but not ideals. That story will have to wait for another volume, however, for this one closes in 1958, leaving readers hungry for more.
Lerner’s welcome autobiography also makes a fine contribution to social history.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56639-889-4
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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