A bittersweet memoir of growing up absurd in rural Mississippi, then suffering the slings and arrows of marriage and fatherhood, from the popular author of such vivid fiction as Music of the Swamp (1991) and Lightning Song (1997). Deftly mingling entertaining anecdotes with probing self-analysis, Nordan creates a commendably frank revelation of the ways in which a marked tendency toward impulsive behavior has enhanced and troubled his life. The early chapters are rich in colloquial humor, portraying only-child “Buddy” Nordan’s upbringing in the nowhere Delta town of Itta Bena, where the appearance of the first local TV set causes a sensation, and the existence of racism first becomes real for Buddy once he hears stories about the notorious Emmett Till murder case (later the subject of Nordan’s fine novel Wolf Whistle, 1993). There are further ominous foreshadowings in the irreversibly depressed figure of Buddy’s mild-mannered alcoholic stepfather, and in scattershot intimations of the preadolescent Lewis’s seemingly interconnected obsession with sex, frequent irrational anger, and fascination with violence (hence his title). Generic accounts of young-adult high jinks (like locking himself out of a hotel room while drunk and naked) occupy the book’s meandering midsection, but are succeeded by increasingly candid descriptions of recovering from a nearly fatal automobile accident (in which the other driver was killed, as Nordan learned when the man’s widow unaccountably visited him in the hospital), a promising first marriage that ended in divorce, “the enormity of . . . [his eldest] son’s suicide” (provoked, Nordan realized, by his own alcoholism, infidelity, and parental failure), and his successful remarriage, literary career, and peacemaking with both his own demons and the erosions of aging. Some painful truth telling, and an eye-opening explanation of how one writer’s complicated psyche came to be, in a worthy piece of personal history that’s also a helpful gloss on Nordan’s distinctive novels and stories. (First serial to Harper’s and Oxford American)
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2000
ISBN: 1-56512-199-6
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
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
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