A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.
Following the untimely death of his adopted African-American son, a father seeks posthumous reconciliation in this affecting collection of personal letters by Gough.
Jeff and his fraternal twin, Shelia, were 7 years old when they were adopted. The author and his wife, Judy, spotted the photographs of “two black kids available for adoption” in the local newspaper. At the end of the 1960s, attitudes toward racial integration in America were changing, marked by the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, yet racial tensions remained high in many states. The author, who describes himself as living a “white Anglo-Saxon lifestyle,” was all too aware of having spent the summer of 1965 working as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. Each of the letters in this book is addressed to deceased Jeff, gently explaining the background to his adoption into a white family. Jeff is described as a charismatic yet defiant child; his actions, in part, related to him being physically and emotionally abused during the first six years of his life. He remained naturally defensive, twisting away from his adoptive father’s embrace. As he grew older, he began to steal, beginning with what seemed an innocuous piggy bank heist but in later years turning into car burglaries, joyriding, and petty theft. Evidently beyond his father’s physical control and emotional guidance, Jeff’s life rapidly spiraled downward, and as a young man he spent time between the YMCA and jail, heading toward a tragic end. The author’s stylistic approach is admirably succinct and frank: “you came into our family as a child who had learned to take because nothing was given.” The book may fail to fully reflect the emotional viewpoints of Jeff’s sister or his adoptive siblings, who remain muted throughout, yet that’s excusable given how this is essentially a monologue from father to son. While more broadly exploring the bonds and strains of interracial adoptive parenthood, the brave, cathartic writing also offers a window to street-level racial tensions during the civil rights movement.
A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5033-0437-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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