A terse, spirited memoir that reads like a picaresque novel.
Autobiography of an acclaimed Russian writer who grew up “hungrier, dirtier, and colder than everyone else.”
In a lively, irreverent memoir, journalist and fiction writer Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In, 2014, etc.), known for her subversive fairy tales, recalls a nightmarish childhood. She was born in 1938 in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, the city’s “most famed residential building.” While she was still an infant, her family members, Bolshevik intellectuals, were deemed “enemies of the people.” In 1941, she, her mother, grandmother, and aunt fled Moscow in a cattle car for Kuibyshev, where they were treated as “pariahs, untouchables.” In gritty detail, the author depicts their precarious life during the war. Always starving, the author “ate glue in secret because of the rumor that it was flavored with real cherries.” The family foraged in neighbors’ garbage, and her aunt made soup from cabbage leaves picked up from the ground at the market. Dirty, “shaggy, covered with lice and bedbug bites,” for a time she begged in the streets, once pretending to be crippled. After the war, she and her mother were able to return to the Metropol, but by then she was “an unmanageable, wild child” and therefore unwelcome at the hotel. She was sent to a summer camp, which nurtured her “hatred of constant supervision and collectivism of any kind, and at the same time admiration to the point of tears at the sight of a marching squad.” Feisty and incorrigible, Petrushevskaya managed to get through high school, despite earning low grades, and she went on to study journalism in college. “We had to read endless tomes on the Communist press, primarily by Lenin,” she writes. “We were being trained to become ideologically sound ignoramuses,” but she was determined to get a diploma so that she could work as a professional journalist. With spunk and defiance, she survived, and transcended, the privations of her youth.
A terse, spirited memoir that reads like a picaresque novel.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-312997-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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