Ultimately off-putting and unappealing, due to a whiny, self-pitying attitude conveyed in overwrought prose.
Adopted as a newborn, novelist Homes (This Book Will Save Your Life, 2006, etc.) finally meets her biological parents.
The author embarked on this journey of self-discovery after being contacted by her biological mother, who gave birth to Homes as a result of an affair with her married employer at a Washington, D.C., dress shop. Ellen Ballman never wed, and she appears a lonely, erratic and needy lost soul to her 31-year-old daughter. Uneasy and frightened, Homes pushes her away, basically avoiding all but sporadic telephone contact after one face-to-face meeting. Upon learning of her death, Homes gathers Ballman’s meager papers and belongings, putting them aside for seven years before sifting through them in an unsuccessful attempt to discover who she really was. Meanwhile, the author’s biological father, still married with children, seems pleasant enough when she contacts him. They have several cordial lunches, and he persuades her to take a DNA test, which apparently confirms his paternity. But he never fulfills an early promise to introduce her to his family. Homes seems naïvely outraged by this, seemingly unaware how her presence around the Christmas dinner table might prove awkward for all concerned. Years later, after she has penned a thinly disguised magazine article about their relationship, he refuses to provide the DNA test and ceases all communication with her. We can’t help but wonder why the author, who kept her emotionally fragile mother at arm’s length, complains bitterly when her biological father does the same to her. Though fairly riveting in its early stages, the narrative sags noticeably when Homes launches a genealogical research project into both her biological and adoptive families. That exercise, like much of this unsatisfying and depressing story, proves to be of far more interest to the principals involved than to the reader.
Ultimately off-putting and unappealing, due to a whiny, self-pitying attitude conveyed in overwrought prose.Pub Date: April 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03838-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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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