Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child’s observations with an adult’s insights.
An elliptical and elusive memoir that skips back and forth across time and circles back on itself as the author comes to terms with events and circumstances in a way that she couldn’t comprehend as a young child.
“I am five,” writes Howard (Literature/Denver Univ.; Foreign Correspondent, 2013, etc.), of a time when her father’s health and her family both seemed to be falling apart. “It’s probably only a few months or slightly more. Any time is a very long time, and all that time is time in the memory of an unformed mind. Be careful, my therapist reminds me, now, in these much later days: those may be screen memories…the memories that we put in place to protect us from worse memories.” This is one of the rare intrusions of the author’s adulthood on her impressions as a child, when coming-of-age in hardscrabble Oklahoma didn’t seem as toxic as she would later realize it was, when her parents’ marriage wasn’t as unstable as it would soon prove to be, and when TV reruns, turning time into something of a jigsaw puzzle, seemed as real as whatever she was experiencing in her so-called real life. Actors on TV (including musician Jerry Reed) become more vivid characters in her memory—and her memoir—than the members of her family. Over the course of this brief memoir, everything changes, primarily because of the stroke suffered by Howard’s father, who had been in the process of leaving her mother and moving in with his girlfriend, starting a new life. That new life proved stillborn, though the tension between mother and girlfriend intensified as the stroke and subsequent surgeries left her father “a patchwork doll.” Instead, the author is the one who found new life. She is the one who got away, the one that those left behind resent because she escaped “this hell hole.”
Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child’s observations with an adult’s insights.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944211-67-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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