A memoir of a woman's journey to find her birth parents that provides some interesting reflections on the institution and...
Sequel to the author’s bestselling memoir Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found (2000).
The child of young parents compelled to give an infant daughter up to adoption in the early 1960s, Lauck begins by returning to material from her earlier memoir: her treatment at the hands of careless adoptive parents, years of being shuttled from one reluctant relation to another, the complex relationship with a half brother and horrifying experiences of sexual and emotional abuse. Here she focuses on how the knowledge of being adopted informed those early experiences and shaped the course of her failed first marriage. While the author had searched for her birth parents, and her mother especially, before the birth of her own children, the arrival of her son set in motion a larger spiritual journey to discover her identity as a woman, mother, wife and human. She studied Buddhism and struggled to save her marriage, eventually recognizing that her need to know herself contributed to the failure of a relationship with a good man. She navigated the arcane system of state adoption law and finally, with the help of a private detective, located her birth mother in Reno, Nev. The most interesting parts of the narrative describe that complex and belated parent-child relationship, which may not have resulted in any particular intimacy but did heal some of Lauck's most important psychic wounds. However, the narrative is overly cool and analytical, and the author averts her gaze from some of the most difficult and raw parts of such a history—perhaps in deference to the privacy and feelings of her natural birth family, who never emerge as fully developed characters. The result is a story that never quite compels, despite the thoughtful writing and occasionally powerful moments of emotional honesty.
A memoir of a woman's journey to find her birth parents that provides some interesting reflections on the institution and emotional experience of adoption but keeps the reader at arm's length.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58005-367-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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