Praise, love, and honor all play roles in this respectful, highly affectionate memoir about a spirited mother-daughter...
An Oscar-winning actress pays tribute to her mother.
When Harden’s mother began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease, Harden decided to try to capture her memories before they were gone. In this soulful memoir, she pays homage to the woman who raised her. She tells stories from her earliest childhood days to the present and emphasizes the beliefs and values her mother instilled in her. Harden narrates chronologically, using the seasons as metaphors for the various stages in life. Chronicling her early life, she describes how her father’s work in the Navy required the family to move around, including stops in California, Greece, and Japan. While they were living in Japan, her mother learned the Japanese art of flower arranging, ikebana, an artistic method of flower placement that incorporates three principle ideas: heaven, earth, and man. Ikebana was clearly Harden’s mother’s passion, and the author skillfully blends in descriptions of the flower arrangements her mother made and the classes she taught on ikebana. She offers tales of how her mother gently encouraged her to audition for a play, which began her successful acting career; of going to the Academy Awards; and of traveling through New Zealand with her mom instead of her boyfriend. It’s abundantly clear that her mother was there for Harden through the good and the bad, so the knowledge that those memories no longer exist for her mother are especially heartbreaking. In keeping with the author’s flower and gardening motif, she describes her mother’s condition as “a weed run wild, slowly choking the path to memory.” One of her few points of solace is the fact that her mother “has somehow managed to keep [her dignity]. Her appreciation of beauty remains as a purifier for her spirit.”
Praise, love, and honor all play roles in this respectful, highly affectionate memoir about a spirited mother-daughter relationship.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3570-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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