A war correspondent's struggle to leave the battles behind and embark on a life of motherhood.
In this sweeping memoir, di Giovanni (The Place at the End of the World, 2006, etc.) offers a portrait of a love story abloom in wartime. While covering the Bosnian War in 1993, she became smitten with a French cameraman named Bruno, whose charm and charisma would forever alter her life. "Everything about falling in love during wartime, perhaps because our exterior world was so chaotic, was so effortless," writes the author. “It was almost adolescent in its lack of complication." Yet complications soon emerged, and after the pair endured one too many life-threatening assignments, they eventually married, di Giovanni giving birth to her son, Luca, soon after. While Luca's birth provided a momentary glimpse of normalcy in their lives, when Bruno returned to the war zones, he and the author’s love story began to wilt. The once indefatigable cameraman began struggling with an array of physical and mental ailments, including a descent into alcoholism that took a dramatic toll on the family. As di Giovanni reflected on her decision to become a foreign reporter, she writes, “I had chosen to leave my home and my family and go as far away as possible, but I had no idea how desperately I would miss them.” While her role as wife and mother provided a temporary fix, Bruno proved not enough family to make the world whole again. A plainly told, occasionally exotic tale of love gone awry.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26558-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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