An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.
Multifaceted poet and author Braverman (Wonders of the West, 1993, etc.) renounces her native Los Angeles for rural upstate New York in a series of wry, trenchant geography lessons.
“Fusion City,” the first essay in this collection, describes the author’s upbringing as a poor welfare kid in late-1950s LA, before it became “the destination city,” famous for film and media. In a pithy pronouncement characteristically stripped of sentimentality, Braverman writes, “Our Los Angeles was where you went after divorce and scandal, bankruptcy, foreclosure, imminent starvation, bad health, and personal exile.” Subsequent chapters return to this squalid, scintillating city, but only in memory. In 1994, she fled the West Coast with her husband and teenaged daughter to live for six years in a fabulously spacious old farmhouse in the punishing snow belt at the base of the Allegheny Mountains. There, as she records in six “transmissions” to her old hometown, she reinvented herself as a gardener astonished by the change of seasons, a protector of the four deer that frequented her property in spite of hunters. “Transmission to Los Angeles #3” is a meditation on female friends who also left LA, for more fulfilling pursuits. “Escaping Los Angeles: Uncle Irving’s Advice” and “Hunting and Trapping Aunt Sarah” channel the author’s Russian-Jewish ancestors, who came to the Promised Land via Ellis Island. In “The Collective Voice of Los Angeles Speaks: Marilyn Monroe,” Braverman allows the “icon, oracle and prophet” to define the phenomenon of “personal history fusing with the sanctity of fame”; it’s the book’s least personal and satisfying piece. “P.S. House for Sale” is a longwinded, tongue-in-cheek realtor’s ad for the author’s East Coast farmhouse. Braverman now lives in San Francisco.
An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55597-438-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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