A heartfelt and rich narrative tapestry.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist explores her charming but mysterious father’s life and family history.
Jestingly called “the Duke of Villanova” by Scott (A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, 2011) and her family, Robert Scott grew up the heir to a “middling American fortune” built by the author’s grandfather. Yet Robert, who did not have access to the trusts that “went to the oldest generation,” insisted on spending money he earned—first as a lawyer then, later, as president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—on maintaining a family mansion he did not own. Drawing on family letters and conversations, her father’s journals, and her own vivid memories, the author probes the secrets of her family. As Scott chronicles, Robert’s grandfather, who was reported to have died of illness during World War I, actually committed suicide out of fear of being publicly humiliated for “a bender involving a woman and booze.” Robert’s beautiful socialite mother, Helen, was the inspiration for the character Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, and his literary-minded father, Edgar, consorted with members of the Algonquin Round Table before founding a Philadelphia stockbrokerage. But for all their glamour, Robert’s parents remained a sadly “intermittent presence” in the life of a son who would later say that he had been “raised by Irish cooks and maids.” Reading Robert’s journals—discovered nearly a decade after his death—the author discovered that her outwardly breezy father suffered a deep existential anguish that came out in his lifelong addiction to alcohol. The family story the author tells is fascinating for the painful personal legacies it uncovers. At the same time, it is also compelling for the parallels it draws between an earlier age of inequality and our own and the questions it raises about how contemporary stories of new-rich families “will play out, one hundred years hence.”
A heartfelt and rich narrative tapestry.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59463-419-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
