Well-written and quite revealing.
Makdisi (Beirut Fragments, 1990) blends feminism and international politics in this examination of the lives and aspirations of the women of her family over roughly the last century.
Born in Jerusalem to Arab Christians, Makdisi was raised by her grandmother Teta and mother to envision and train herself for “a perfect domestic life,” an idea that “was as much a part of our feminine existence as the air we breathed.” When she came of age, she writes, Makdisi and the women of her own generation dismissed the elders: “We thought they lacked strength, or imagination, or gratitude, or willpower, or intellect, or something.” Living through the Lebanese civil war tempered such attitudes, and she embarked on a long project to reconstruct the elders’ lives and times in order to understand just how much strength, and intellect, and imagination they had. Much of Makdisi’s gentle and largely uncomplaining account is a catalogue of disappointments, for the lives of her forebears did not often match their dreams; her father, for instance, had to return to Palestine from his cherished America to satisfy his mother’s deathbed bidding, “but he never really forgave her for deflecting him from what he had seen as his destiny in the New World.” Just so, where she had always thought of Teta as a ghostly, elderly figure shrouded in black who moved silently throughout the house, Makdisi discovers that the Teta of the 1900s was a vivacious, beloved presence independent-minded enough to reject “the festive henna evenings that preceded weddings, especially in Galilee, where she now lived,” a rejection that subtly ties in to Makdisi’s earlier disquisition on why so many young Arabs are now taking the veil—“and many young women, claiming their individual right to do so, are as zealous in this regard as their mothers or grandmothers were in removing it.”
Well-written and quite revealing.Pub Date: April 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06156-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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