Thoughtful reflections on pain, love, and family.
A grandmother’s death reveals complex emotions and a tangled family history.
Growing up in Philadelphia, novelist Cary (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; If Sons, Then Heirs, 2011, etc.), founder of Art Sanctuary and SafeKidsStories.com, was doted upon by her wealthy, elegant grandmother, spending delightful weekends in her spacious New Jersey home. “Yes, yes, yes, I knew that I was being spoiled,” the author admits. Only later did she discover that the woman who indulged her was more complicated and difficult than she had realized. In a candid, sensitive memoir, Cary chronicles her 100-year-old grandmother’s last year, when she lived with the author and her family. It was a stressful period that tested Cary’s patience and love and motivated her search for the “truth and lies, business and money, and communal and racial memory” that made up her grandmother’s long life. Besides accompanying her grandmother to concerts and museums as a child, she also rode along “in Nana’s latest late-model car” to collect rents from her tenants in Philadelphia, who lived in apartments “Nana would not have wanted to live in.” When she asked about the disparity, Nana told her “this was business.” Yet the hard-nosed rent collector (she once told a tenant who complained about mice to get a cat) also administered a scholarship fund for black students and set aside a storage room “to save people’s furniture for them after evictions.” Her treatment of family could be harsh, as well: She feuded with her son—Cary’s father—reconciling only when she was near death; and she treated her husband with condescension. As her health worsened, she became combative. Although she had survived serious illnesses and a car crash, degenerative heart disease finally undermined her apparently indomitable life force. Cary recounts Nana’s increasing weakness as well as the enraged demands—for particular foods and constant attention—that generated Cary’s own debilitating physical responses. She recounts, as well, her negotiations with nurses, kind hospice workers, and Medicare’s frustrating bureaucracy, experiences familiar to many caregivers.
Thoughtful reflections on pain, love, and family.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63588-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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