Gordon, a biographer of remarkable gifts (Eliot's New Life, 1988, etc.), turns her glass inward and examines the youth and maturity that she and her friends knew in Cape Town, Israel, New York, and Europe: a wide-ranging picaresque story bound together by childhood attachments never set aside. As a Jew growing up in South Africa in the 1950's, Gordon found herself doubly isolated, for the gentile community that surrounded her—and through which she could move only with the most practiced circumspection—was itself implacably sealed off from the black population that comprised the country's invisible majority. The effect was claustrophobic in the extreme and brought Gordon into alliance with schoolmates who suffered the contradictions as keenly as she did. Her narrative quickly focuses on three of these: Romy, Ellie, and Rose—all of whom died young, all of whom struggled against the social and imaginative constraints of their society. This is preeminently a story of exile—the actual exile of those (like Gordon) who left a world they could no longer endure, and the internal exile of those who tried to manage in a place that gave no scope to their desires—and it moves along that boundary between nostalgia and anger that is the exile's true domain. Good use is made of the diaries and letters of those concerned, and Gordon's voice is both intimate and precise throughout—especially as she describes her own difficulties in establishing an academic career. The tribute that she pays her friends is not entirely testimonial, however, for it sets forth the process by which Gordon grew into her own role—as an observer and interpreter of the lives of others. Elegant and strong: a subtle eye trained across years of memory. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 29, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03164-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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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