Unsettling, of course, but hopeful and uplifting.
Harrowing account of a teenage girl in crisis, told with remarkable frankness by her mother.
Dudman, a divorcée raising two children while running a network of radio stations in Maine, thought she was doing a good job of balancing work and family. Suddenly, however, her daughter spun out of control—staying out all night, skipping school, drinking, taking drugs, lying, screaming curses at her mother, even threatening her with a knife. Unable to cope with Augusta's frighteningly self-destructive behavior and fearful for her daughter’s safety, Dudman eventually sent the 16-year-old out west to a rugged six-week wilderness program for troubled children. This was followed by placement in Forest Ridge, a boarding school in Oregon designed expressly to help adolescents like her. Dudman’s vivid account of the painful visits with her angry, sometimes even hateful daughter, and of her encounters with other parents and school counselors chill the heart. Shortly after one visit, when some progress appeared to have been made, Augusta ran away. After a detective found her, Dudman sent her for another session at the wilderness program, and then back to Forest Ridge, where she again ran away. Through the Runaway Switchboard and Home Free, Augusta contacted her mother and begged to be allowed to come home. Dudman agreed, stipulating that certain rules of behavior be followed. Soon after August returned, Dudman placed her in a tiny residential school in Camden, from which she graduated in 1999. Dudman, who readily reveals her inner turmoil, anger, and despair, does not pretend to know what changed her daughter. Her own adolescent years were a troubled time too, and her recollections of them give a special poignancy to her account of her daughter’s actions. If there’s any message to other parents of teens in this candid memoir of a hellish time, it’s “hang in there.”
Unsettling, of course, but hopeful and uplifting.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0409-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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