An honest, spellbinding account of a remarkable journey.
The extraordinary story of a British journalist who sought out her African birth family.
Born in civil-war-torn Eritrea in 1974, Pool was adopted as an infant by an English academic teaching nearby at the University of Khartoum. The orphanage told him both her parents were dead, and he eventually brought the little girl to Manchester, England, where she enjoyed a middle-class upbringing and education. Fully integrated into her white stepfamily, the author learned she had blood relatives only in 1993, after Eritrea’s liberation from Ethiopia, when the orphanage disclosed that her birth father was in fact alive. A few months later, she received a letter from an older brother she didn’t know she had. Overwhelmed by this unexpected contact, Pool made excuses not to act on the letter for years. Finally, nearing 30 and a feature writer for the Guardian in London, she arranged to meet her Eritrean cousin, who revealed that her mother had died giving birth to her and the whole clan had been hoping to find its lost daughter for years. Pool subsequently embarked on a scary, revelatory journey in search of her roots. At the orphanage in the bustling city of Asmara, she was handed her birth file. Deep in the Eritrean countryside, she met for the first time her aged father and the many siblings who had been raised at home on the farm. These were intensely emotional gatherings, involving copious tears, strange customs and raw feelings. Relatives constantly scolded her for not speaking Tigrinya, the native language. Taken to the hut in the village where she was born, she was astonished and moved to meet her mother’s sister. Having gone through life feeling that she never quite belonged, Pool envied her siblings and cousins their settled life with its “few certainties,” despite the grievous poverty and lack of opportunities. Colloquial, frank and touching, her account grapples with conflicted feelings of rejection and identity.
An honest, spellbinding account of a remarkable journey.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9369-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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