Fascinating, well-told, candid, and tender.
A rare glimpse into the life of one of America’s most revered social activists.
Hennessy (Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance, 2016), granddaughter of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), utilizes family correspondence, Day’s journals, and her own memories to construct a detailed, riveting biography. In many ways, this book is a dual biography, not only of the author’s grandmother, but also her mother, Tamar, who was Day’s only daughter. Indeed, the complex mother-daughter relationship between Dorothy and Tamar makes up a large portion of the book. Hennessy dives right into Day’s unusual and chaotic life. Even as a very young woman, Day was on her own, working varied jobs, coming into and out of abject poverty, experiencing heady love affairs, and always writing. With time, she funneled her energies into three pursuits: her newfound Catholic faith, her daughter, and her great creation, the Catholic Worker, which was primarily a newspaper but which was also a way of life for many activists. Readers will be intrigued to learn of Day’s intimate life story from the 1920s through the 1940s, especially, with the rise of the Catholic Worker as a parallel tale. Somewhat estranged from her mother during the 1950s, Tamar would return to New York and to the Worker, eventually taking it on as her own life’s work. Hennessy presents her grandmother in full. Though her respect for her is great, she also recognizes the challenges she faced and the many facets of her personality and life that prove she, like anyone else, was far from perfect. Perhaps no theme so dominates the book as much as love: the love between mother and daughter, Day’s often unrequited love for Forster Batterham, Tamar’s father, and Day’s love for helping the poor, which drove her life’s work and was inspired by her love for God.
Fascinating, well-told, candid, and tender.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3396-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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