This follow-up to Trust Your Heart (1987), the continuing autobiography of singer and songwriter Collins, is sometimes poignant but poorly constructed. The framing device for this account is the 1992 suicide of Collins’s son Clark, whose struggles with drug abuse and alcoholism were detailed in the earlier book (along with depictions of Collins’s own problems in that regard). However, rather than telling her story from this event forward, she instead backtracks to her childhood and adolescence in Colorado and California, her father’s alcoholism, and her failed first marriage. The treatment of her father’s drinking renders him bizarrely and unevenly as a character in her narrative: One moment he’s a much-loved inspiration, and the next minute, without transition or segue, he’s a raging drunk. Perhaps this is what life with him was like, but the situation begs for further explanation. There are between-chapter meditations from Collins’s journal on the death of her son, but only in the post-suicide chapters (far into the story) do we find any narrative cohesion at all. Sadly enough, it is really the journal excerpts that provide the strongest material here. Collins might have done better to have edited her journal into a text rather than try to interpolate an autobiography in the spaces between. Too much of this text is merely a combination of name-dropping (from her romantic liaisons with Stephen Stills and Stacy Keach to her friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton) and overwritten prose, characterized by an apparent need to modify every noun with an adjective and every adjective with an adverb.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-00397-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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