Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.
Novelist Jasper explores the roots and psyche of an African-American family.
As he approached his 30th year, the author (Seeking Salamanca Mitchell, 2004, etc.) had his view of fatherhood irrevocably challenged when his girlfriend became pregnant. He turned to his family’s difficult patriarch, octogenarian Jesse Langley Sr., for insights. What made Granddaddy Jesse so emotionally diffident and cold, despite the fact that he was an adequate husband, father and grandfather for 60 years? Jasper’s grandfather died before Jasper could visit Greenville, N.C., the place where Jesse grew up, lost his parents and gave himself the name the Lone Ranger. The author was left to pry answers from his immediate family. Grandma Sally recalled meeting Jesse, when she was 19, in the Pentagon lunchroom; it was 1940, and they had both moved out of the South to find work in D.C. For all of their married life they lived on Childress Street in the capital. Jasper’s mother Angela, firstborn of three children, held up the example of her father as a responsible provider to her own husband, Melvin, who eventually caved under the pressure and left. (Ironically, Melvin later started another family and stuck with it.) Jasper visited innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, extracting their stories of survival throughout the tumultuous political decades from the civil-rights movement through the sexual revolution and into the present. He found that few of Jesse’s descendants wanted to talk about the emotional toll that being orphaned and black took on him. In colloquial, heavy-handed prose, Jasper veers capriciously from personal history into muddled family chronology, offering plenty of moral slogans and relationship lessons for his contemporaries.
Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7679-1679-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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