A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.
In this memoir, a mother recalls a two-year struggle to retrieve her abducted children from her ex-husband overseas.
In mid-March 1994, Meredith (When Push Comes to Shove, 2015, etc.) writes, her former spouse kidnapped their two young daughters from Alaska and took them to his native country of Greece. Over the next two years, she tried to locate the girls and bring them back to her Alaska home, all while navigating a bureaucratic and legal labyrinth in a foreign culture. This book is a remarkably eloquent and harrowing account of a journey that would tax any parent. “Get ready for the fight of your life, kid,” her boss at a battered women’s shelter warned her. “There won’t be a quick fix for this one.” Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) navigated similar territory, but Meredith brings a unique perspective to her story, shaped by her own childhood. She says that her mother—who “fancied herself a Hollywood starlet waiting to be discovered”—abandoned her when she was 13. “She unloaded her stress on the children before she began unloading the children themselves,” the author notes with typical bluntness. The author didn’t want her own daughter “growing up in a broken home like I did,” but her marriage ended in March 1990 after, she says, her husband tried to strangle her. She was awarded custody of their two girls but that didn’t prevent him from kidnapping them four years later, she writes. “Not even the electric chair or a lifetime in jail would keep me from blowing your brains out if you ever come close to the girls again,” she says that he told her after she made an initial, abortive trip to Greece to retrieve them. Meredith draws readers into her excruciating quest with her command of detail and language: the wife of one of her Greek lawyers is “inexplicably comforting to look at, like a human quilt,” and an American expatriate married to a Greek man lives in a home that “comes with all the amenities, including his mother and his childhood furnishings.” The author encounters one obstacle after another, including being arrested in Greece and then sued by her ex-husband for violating a Greek custody order. The book’s conclusion could hardly be a more resounding tribute to the human spirit.
A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-834-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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