Radish’s (A Grand Day to Get Lost, 2013, etc.) latest work of nonfiction is a collection of vignettes taken from her own life, from her self-conscious childhood to her days as wild child, hard-boiled reporter and devoted mother.
These stories offer a vast, eclectic array of experience, depicted with the grit and incisiveness of a journalist who’s covered brutal events such as domestic violence, murder and war. Radish’s prose is a joy—energetic, attitudinal, often hilarious and perfectly suited to the anecdotal form. Having met a man claiming to be Jesus, for example, Radish quips, “Well, I’m not dressed for this encounter.” Readers become well-acquainted with the author’s oft-espoused “fearless broad” philosophy, and she’s at her best when recounting experiences in which she takes center stage. In “The Little Girl and the Tomatoes,” for example, she describes a childhood job in which she picked tomatoes in stultifying heat and how it engendered her lifelong sense of tenacity. In “Paper Clips, Two-Sided Paper, My Penis Please,” Radish recounts, with equal parts dark humor and rage, attending the funeral of an editor who sexually assaulted her under the guise of mentorship. However, the essays about marginalized individuals are less convincing, as they present the people almost entirely through Radish’s own perception, projecting attributes, pasts and even afterlives onto them instead of describing their own lived experience. An encounter with writer Eudora Welty, for example, is less about the woman herself than about Radish’s visceral reaction to Welty’s presence and advice, and in “Soldier Boy,” the author recounts a brief encounter with a young soldier about to go to war, imagining a hypothetical trajectory of his life and a detailed scenario for his death.
A bold, rollicking work that often reveals more about the author than her subjects.
Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940716435
Page Count: 240
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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