This fascinating family chronicle brings Yourcenar's multifarious abilities as an imaginative and erudite historian, vivid memoirist, and observant novelist to bear on her father's family, the Flemish Cleenewercks, or ``Do-littles.'' In the second of three volumes of her family chronicles (the first, Dear Departed, 1991, portrayed her mother's family), Yourcenar's (190387) narrative begins in prehistory with a mixture of high lyricism and subjective anthropology and progressively molds itself around the Roman and Christian invasions of Celtic Gaul. Out of this rich but anonymous background, her first identifiable paternal relatives emerge in the Middle Agesthe Cleenewercks and the Bieswals, minor Flemish nobility, with a recessive trait for soldiery and religion, and a strong legal gene. The law provides Yourcenar with a partial storybook—two 17th-century ancestors who judged a witch, for example, give her an excellent social and psychological opportunity—but her sharpest characterizations, of not only forebears but their times too, come from surviving portraits, including two ancestresses married to and painted by Rubens. By the 19th century, this historical memoir takes on Balzacian dimensions and Proustian overtones with the lives of Yourcenar's grandfather, Michel-Charles Cleenewerck de Crayencour, a civil servant perpetually on the wrong side of contemporary French politics and his philistine wife; and her father, Michel, a rebellious young man destined for exile. Yourcenar intimately reconstructs and retells their lives with both sympathy and irony. She revivifies her grandfather's wooden memoir, which includes an account of a notorious railway disaster outside Versailles, infusing it with her own sly observations, and rejoins her father's fragmentary anecdotes and casual disclosures about his wayward life. Sensitive to both the psychological and the historical, with an eye to fate and character, How Many Years is Yourcenar's family album for the ages. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-17319-2
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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