A tender, thoughtful portrait of four generations, prompting hopes that the author’s first full-length prose work won’t be...
Prizewinning poet Goodison (English/Univ. of Michigan; Goldengrove, 2006, etc.) pays tribute to her Jamaican heritage.
Starting in the mid-19th century, when her English great-grandfather, William Harvey, established a homestead next to the mighty river that would eventually bear his name, the author doesn’t so much trace events as animate the characters of her relatives who lived them. Readers seeking a detailed record of Jamaican history should look elsewhere, for Goodison unveils intimate worlds teeming with all the local flavor and poignancy of a Zora Neale Hurston novel. The five “fabulous Harvey girls” of her mother’s generation spark her particular interest, she writes, and “the place that had produced my mother’s people…was to shape my imagination for the rest of my life.” Describing the Harvey River, her family’s metaphorical life source, Goodison brings the memoir back to herself: “There are lost pearls and hopeless cases and the bones of runaway Africans down there as well as wedges of iron-hard brown soap which the women of Harvey River used to wash acres of clothes in this same river. As long as I swim in it, I will be borne to safety.” Yet the story isn’t really about her, except as the lucky offspring of people deeply, happily rooted in their family history. In a funny passage from the afterword to the U.S. edition, Goodison sends home a rapturous letter describing a breathtaking New York City sunset over the water, and her mother replies, “Who were the Hudsons that the river was named after?”
A tender, thoughtful portrait of four generations, prompting hopes that the author’s first full-length prose work won’t be her last.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-133755-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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