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UNTIL DEATH DO US PART

Name: UNTIL DEATH DO US PART
Author: Ingrid Betancourt
ISBN: 0-06-000890-3

MY STRUGGLE TO RECLAIM COLOMBIA

by Ingrid Betancourt & translated by Steven Rendall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2002

By the end, the text has abandoned its disguise as a memoir and revealed its true identity as a rather conventional campaign...

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A courageous Colombian senator, member of a politically active family, charts her course through the dangerous political waters of her troubled country.

Currently running for president of Colombia, Betancourt begins in December 1996, when she had an ominous meeting with an anonymous man who warned that her life was in imminent jeopardy because her aggressive anti-corruption agenda angered the nation’s druglords and their minions. Alarmed, Betancourt hurried home, gathered up her children, and whisked them off to New Zealand to stay with their father, from whom the author separated in 1990. We return to this meeting 180 pages later. In the interim, Betancourt takes us back to her somewhat privileged childhood in France, where her father served as a UNESCO official. Her parents separated when she was 14, but Betancourt admired them both for their rigorous political and personal rectitude. In the summer of 1986, she returned to Colombia to visit her mother, who worked to better the lives of homeless children, and decided to become a legislator. First, Betancourt helped her mother win a senate campaign; soon, she received an appointment in the ministry of education. She was and is horrified by the corruption and apathy in Colombia’s government. Describing a visit to a coastal village repeatedly leveled by storms, she asks, “What kind of democracy is it that lets its people die like this without any choice?” Throughout, Betancourt employs the present tense, which creates an affecting immediacy and compelling urgency. As we follow her triumphs and travails, including a trial on trumped-up ethics charges and a fortunate escape from an assassination attempt, we feel we are alongside her. But she is not always a tolerable companion. Her righteous indignation sometimes devolves into simple self-righteousness, and repeated accounts of her own ethical purity eventually grate rather than ingratiate.

By the end, the text has abandoned its disguise as a memoir and revealed its true identity as a rather conventional campaign autobiography.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2002

ISBN: 0-06-000890-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.