Just what one would expect from the no-nonsense Elders: an unvarnished account that tells as much about our society as about her remarkable life. In collaboration with writer Chanoff (a visiting scholar at Brandeis Univ.), whose labors are happily invisible, Elders tells an inspiring story of a child born to an Arkansas sharecropper in 1933 who 60 years later became the first black woman surgeon general of the US. Family and church instilled in her early a commitment to education and a high moral sense. With a college scholarship, good role models, hard work, the GI Bill, and strong mentors, she rose swiftly. When she became chief resident at the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1963, it was an unheard-of honor for a black woman, and with the help of an NIH fellowship grant in biochemistry, she was soon Arkansas's resident expert in pediatric endocrinology. Elders's story is much more than a brilliant career rÇsumÇ. She shares details of her personal life—her strong marriage, her husband's deep depression, the loss of a child, and her younger son's problems with cocaine—and her introduction to public life. In 1987, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton asked her to direct the state's health department. With this appointment, Elders—a pragmatist, not a politician—battled ``antichoice, antieducation, anticondom fundamentalists'' outraged by her plans for distributing condoms in school clinics. Six years later, when Clinton picked the outspoken Elders as his surgeon general, he knew exactly what he was getting. Her account of her brief tenure, only 15 months, is restrained, but it's clear that relations with her boss, Donna Shalala, were rocky, and she blames Shalala and Leon Panetta, not Clinton, for her dismissal after the masturbation flap. Now back in Arkansas teaching pediatrics, Elders says she has no regrets. She knows who she is and what she stands for. After reading this absorbing autobiography, readers will too. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-688-14722-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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