Surely one of the most exhaustively-researched attempts to exorcise personal demons.
Novelist and Harvard grad Sedgwick (The Education of Mrs. Bemis, 2002) painstakingly scrutinizes his Boston Brahmin family history to reveal more than a few skeletons.
In 2000, at age 46, Sedgwick was enjoying a thriving writing career and a loving marriage that yielded two beautiful daughters. But poor investment choices, one daughter’s sports injuries and general malaise slowly chipped away at his happiness and tipped his downward spiral into debilitating depression. Sleepless and crazed from the reverse effects of a sleeping pill, suicide seemed appealing, but instead, Sedgwick began psychotherapy and embarked on a journey of self-discovery by researching his New England family lineage, which dates back to the Washington, Jefferson and Adams’ presidencies, and the origins of his present mental state. Among his roots he finds an inherited legacy of mental illness and desperate behavior. Sedgwick’s multi-generational exploration entailed scouring mountains of previously unseen archives and making personal visits to the original townships of his ancestors, enabling the author to reanimate his family heritage beginning with Judge Theodore Sedgwick, who, in the late 1700s, was a spry lawyer with political aspirations in the Berkshires of leafy, colonial western Massachusetts. But second wife Pamela’s family had a history of psychiatric illness. When daughter Catharine Maria grew up, she became a renowned novelist, even as her brother, Harry, dissolved into madness. The legacy of Sedgwick’s grandfather Babbo is melodrama at its finest, and its story is nicely juxtaposed with tender memories of his manic depressive mother and his detached relationship with his father. Years later, a cousin, Edie, became Andy Warhol’s star-struck protégé, then died tragically. The author’s peace arrives with the ultimate embrace of his manic depression: the Sedgwick “family disease.”
Surely one of the most exhaustively-researched attempts to exorcise personal demons.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-052159-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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