McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning short-story collection Elbow Room (1977), writes here with an astonishing range of language and emotion. Having previously addressed the black experience in America on many levels, he now tells a profoundly personal tale of displacement and discovery that is poetic and universal. The life described in this volume comes into focus in a moment of retrospection, in a bitter season of doubt. ``Life itself'' had become his enemy, he writes: ``I sought to control its every effort at intrusion into my personal space''—space that was almost entirely confined to his bed, ``in which I perfected my escape from life into an art.'' Remembering the seasons of pain and repair in a lifetime of missed opportunities, he returns repeatedly in this account to Channie Washington, his longtime tenant, a nurturing, self-reliant, and deeply religious woman who represented sanctuary—``the place where you pause to get your bearings for the road.'' For McPherson, the present beckons to memory slowly, seductively, revelation then coming into Proustian clarity with a crabcake or the sensual gait of a brown-eyed woman descending a stair. The fish market of a Baltimore neighborhood where he first savored crabcakes, the fields of Iowa, where he now teaches, and the streets of Japanese cities, where he sojourned awhile, all gather into a personal monologue that invites us to understand the crossroads he has reached. Ultimately, McPherson finds renewal in simple sentiments. Late in a long conversation-letter to a Japanese friend that runs through the second part of the book, he reminds us that ``if nothing in the future of the present seems permanent . . . one can always focus on . . . the future enjoyment of a Maryland crabcake. Such exercises of the imagination keep hope alive.'' Although its ever-shifting form is sometimes unsettling, this is a thoughtful and life-affirming memoir, unforgettable for its humanity, its gentle pace. McPherson has traveled the world and never lost sight of the inspirational lure of one's origins.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83465-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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
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
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