A text that will appeal to those fond of memoirs about coming of age in the Depression and World War II.
The nonagenarian author of scores of books about travel and history returns with a memoir about his boyhood, youth, and World War II.
Freely (Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World, 2011, etc.), who has a doctorate in physics and taught the subject for decades in Istanbul, displays an unusually precise memory of events from boyhood. After sketching the immigrant stories of his Irish mother and father, the author mentions books he read as a 6-year-old, including The Last of the Mohicans, and he reproduces conversations from the 1930s onward. Such specificity adds an almost surreal clarity to the text. Freely writes about his successes and failures in school, his family’s deep financial difficulties (they lived in a series of unpleasant dwellings), and some of his rough boyhood jobs—e.g., delivering papers (often to customers disinclined to pay), a gig in a paint factory, a stock clerk. In this final position, a woman supervisor grabbed him by the testicles and welcomed him to the job. Freely developed an early love for Homer—especially The Odyssey—and allusions to that work (and its hero) appear continually. He enlisted in the Navy, with his mother’s reluctant consent, and the final two-thirds of the text relate those experiences—training, friends, scrapes with the authorities, and his experiences abroad, including some dangerous work along the Stilwell Road and the Burma Road. He saw horrors everywhere. Throughout the book, Freely treats many details of his experiences with an equality that they don’t always deserve—readers will yearn for more emphasis at times, since all memories are not created equal. An error in the epigraph: he attributes to Keats a poem by Longfellow.
A text that will appeal to those fond of memoirs about coming of age in the Depression and World War II.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49470-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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