An affecting and earnest testimonial to the power of a humane criminal system built on rehabilitation more than punishment.
A young African-American man’s memoir of a life of crime redirected.
Born poor in Haiti, St. Germain came to America with his family as a youth and, in the streets of Brooklyn, lost himself in the illegal economy that thrived on the streets. He fought and stole, “trying to process this new world and answer my own questions, all the while wearing a tight mask that showed none of this.” As a self-styled “street pharmacist,” he earned the nickname Buffett, because, as a helpful older friend explained, “Warren Buffett is gangsta,” a model money machine among the Scarface crowd. Rather than becoming filthy rich, as that name portended, St. Germain fell into the system, winding up in Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx, “a notorious intake place for troubled teens” whose alumni included Mike Tyson and rapper Fat Joe. But there, St. Germain was given an opportunity: rather than the normal machine of turning broken youth into broken men, he was placed in the Boys Town boot camp system, which teaches values of responsibility and respect. Said a staff member, “the purpose here is to retrain your behavior,” and retrain St. Germain’s behavior it did. “It went against everything I’d ever known,” he writes. At first, he went along with it to game the system and gain the merit points that earned privileges, but eventually he became a committed advocate of the system—and, moreover, a devotee of reading and education, guided by books of African-American history and in particular a memoir called Dreams of My Father, affording St. Germain “a kinship with this mixed-race senator with a foreign background, a funny name, and the gall to think he could change the world.”
An affecting and earnest testimonial to the power of a humane criminal system built on rehabilitation more than punishment.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245879-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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