A deeply insightful, empathetic family history.
A sharp portrait of two women who struggled to shape their lives as their world changed.
Poet Moore (The Bishop’s Daughter, 2008, etc.), who has written perceptive, revelatory biographies of her father, Bishop Paul Moore, and maternal grandmother, painter Margarett Sargent, now focuses her attention on her mother, Jenny McKean (1923-1973). Based in part on an unfinished memoir that Jenny bequeathed to her, Moore also draws on letters, scrapbooks, and abundant interviews with family, Jenny’s many friends, and lovers to create a sensitive portrait of a complex, contradictory woman. Born into great wealth, Jenny greatly enjoyed the “dinners and dances” of her debutante year, at the same time feeling stimulated by what she was learning at Vassar: comparative anthropology, for example, where, for the first time, she studied race, “an issue that would gather force and meaning for her and inform her moral and political thinking for the rest of her life.” So did her marriage to Paul, also born into wealth, who had decided to become a priest. For both, the church offered a sense of meaning and mission. Jenny defied “the limitations of her role as a clergy wife,” becoming an active partner in the couple’s work in the slums of Jersey City, where they lived in near poverty and, influenced by the Christian radical Dorothy Day, threw themselves “into a life of service, away from the spiritual emptiness and lack of community in which they had grown up.” Honor, the oldest of their nine children, competed for her mother’s attention not only with her siblings, but also with her mother’s consuming social and political engagement; as she grew up, Jenny desired to extricate herself from her roles as wife and mother and forge a new identity. By 1970, with women’s liberation bursting into American culture, both the author and her mother “began to stumble toward new terms of engagement—as free women.” For each of them, the stumbling exposed emotional wounds, and for Moore, the discovery of her mother’s gift to her: “a kind of force within that never allows me to stay still.”
A deeply insightful, empathetic family history.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-39-308005-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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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