A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.
Powerful debut memoir relates what happened after the author’s white mother and black father split up.
Cross (Journalism/Columbia Univ.) knew a lot about race from a very young age. People frowned at little June’s hair, said she looked Chinese, said she had her daddy’s lips. Her parents separated in January 1954, when she was a baby. Identified as “white” on her birth certificate, she lived with her mother, Norma, in New York for a few years, but then her skin got darker, and she could no longer “pass.” Before June was old enough to enter school, Norma sent her to live in Atlantic City with a middle-class black couple, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul. Eventually, her mother married actor Larry Storch. June visited them in the summertime, but Norma always worried that her presence threatened Storch’s career. Meanwhile, Peggy loved her like a daughter, but they clashed as the ‘60s unfolded; the older woman had little patience for African-American radicalism and worried that June was limiting herself at Harvard by hanging out with other black students. The memoir follows Cross through college and beyond, into a successful career in journalism that included making an Emmy-winning documentary, also called Secret Daughter, about her childhood and her relationship with Norma. Here, she concludes that her mother “had done the right thing,” though she also knows that her childhood lefts its marks: “Trust eludes me. . . . I waited until middle age to marry. I never had children.” The kiddie voice employed in early chapters (“Paul’s God had a mommie called Virgin Mary”) is replaced by the middle of the book with a strong, even tone.
A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.Pub Date: May 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-88555-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
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
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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