Poignant glimpses into the life of a survivor.
From memoirist and novelist Harrison (The Seal Wife, 2002, etc.), a collection of personal essays on love, longing, loss, and childhood.
Having revealed her incestuous relationship with her father in The Kiss (1997), the author here explores how her life was transformed by longing for her mother, who abandoned her early to the care of her grandparents. Mom left her behind, Harrison learned, as a replacement daughter, in essence using her as a hostage to buy her own freedom. Now a parent herself, Harrison writes from a safe distance of her mother and grandmother, the two women she loved, and of her own childhood. At age six, a transcendent experience in the arms of Christian Scientist practitioner made her believe that the spirit could conquer matter and that it was within her power to transform herself into an object worthy of her remote mother’s love. From this conclusion followed such self-destructive behavior as mortification of the flesh, bulimia, and shoplifting. Harrison’s childhood and youth were lonely times when she strained to be loved and, failing that, escaped into an interior landscape of her own creation. Yet her writing also contains humor: a vivid account of her grandmother’s passion for cats and their futile attempts to breed Himalayans at home, for example, and a delightful description of their misadventures at the DMV, where she twice helped her aging grandmother cheat to get her driver’s license renewed. Scenes from Harrison’s life as an adult show her working to be the kind of mother she never knew. Some depict quiet, introspective moments as she ponders the difference between her children’s lives and her own childhood; others are fraught with anxiety as she fights to protect them from the world’s evils, though the enemy may be merely a single blood-bloated tick or an invasion of recalcitrant head lice.
Poignant glimpses into the life of a survivor.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50558-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
