Should leave most readers standing on their heads with admiration.
Finding herself born to be the stable center of a vastly dysfunctional family, Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter keeps her balance with yoga.
Each chapter of Hemingway’s memoir opens with a yoga posture, which has an uplifting effect; readers get the feeling that yoga just might be good for one’s well-being. Mariel’s “heartbreakingly lovely” widowed mother, Byra, married Jack Hemingway after an intense four-year courtship, even though she didn’t love him. Mariel was born four months after grandfather’s suicide in 1961. Lack of love and his own leanings soon left Jack disaffected from his family and paying it little attention while Byra griped about housework and raged at him. Mariel’s eldest sister Muffet was mentally ill; school-skipping, star-crossed middle sister Margaux partied wildly, left home, became a model, and starred in the movie Lipstick, recruiting 13-year-old Mariel for a supporting role. Just as she discovered her talent for acting, Mariel was stuck with the grim task of nursing her cancer-stricken mother. “I came to believe the only way I could avoid the same fate was through controlling what I put into my own mouth,” she writes; she flung herself into vegetarianism, macrobiotics, and other diets until her thyroid gland shut down. She also consulted a succession of “spiritual wacks, psychics, astrologers, and holistic doctors.” At 16, a total innocent, she played a sexually astute teenager in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, then flew off to the Cannes Film Festival with Dad. Still a virgin, she depicted a lesbian track-star champion in Personal Best and later got breast implants to portray murdered Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80. The memoir’s last few chapters chant a litany of woe: Margaux dies of an epileptic seizure a coroner calls suicide, Dad goes into a brain-dead coma while talking with Mariel in the hospital, husband Steve survives cancer and near-drowning. Time to meditate.
Should leave most readers standing on their heads with admiration.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3807-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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