Singer's three recent memoirs, of mystical childhood and randy youth in Poland, of first immigrant days in the New World, are reprinted together here: A Little Boy in Search of God (1976); A Young Man in Search of Love (1978); and Lost in America (1981). The new material consists of a 21-page introduction in which the Nobel Prize winner, more straightforwardly than in previous childhood memoirs (cf. In My Father's Court), outlines the literary/personal influences of his earliest years on Warsaw's Krochmalna Street: his older brother Joshua's atheism, in contrast to orthodoxy and Chassidim; the far-flung stories that appeared in the Yiddish newspapers; his father's courtroom, of course, a school "where I could study the human soul, its caprices, its yearnings, its barriers." And, above all, complementing his father's Torah-centered good nature: his mother's skepticism, pessimism, and sharpness. ("Every news item made her wince in resentment against the Creator who could see all this misery and remain silent. . . I once heard her say 'I hate the human species.' ") No surprises for Singer veterans, then, but a welcome package for newcomers.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1984
ISBN: 0374519927
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
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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