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ADDIE

Name: ADDIE
Author: Mary Lee Settle
ISBN: 1-57003-284-X

A MEMOIR

by Mary Lee Settle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1998

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Addie’s granddaughter, the author, is the real subject here, in a delicate exploration of growing up that gives weight to the land, to the economy, to the river, and most of all, of course, to complex family relationships. “An autobiography that begins with one’s birth begins too late,” says the author, because all the forces that will shape you, cosmic or human, are already in place at the moment of birth. So Settle (Choices, 1995; Charley Bland, 1989; etc.), winner of a National Book Award, lets her autobiography become a memoir of her maternal grandmother, Addie, and of the family homestead in West Virginia that was paid for by salt mines and coal mines. Addie came to the homestead by way of a first marriage that produced three daughters and three attempts at suicide on her part. She was rescued—at one point literally carried off when her husband tried to kill her—by the man who owned the homestead, the man who was her lover and by whom she was already pregnant with Settle’s mother. Having obtained a divorce, Addie took charge of her new home, of her beloved second husband, and of the little land that had not already been leased to the coal companies. There were family tragedies: Addie’s oldest daughter, Minnie, was a morphine addict, so adept that she could “drive the hypodermic through her dress . . . as she sat beating egg whites. . . .”; the husband let himself be run over by a train, although Addie would never concede suicide. Politics also becomes personal: Mother Jones, the almost mythical labor organizer, is a real person here, proselytizing the coal miners of the Kanawha Valley. Addie, at some risk, loaned her a field to hold her meeting. Addie, her children and grandchildren, her in-laws and outlaws (the paternal side of the family) are all aspects of the child, the adult, the novelist that Mary Lee Settle became. The author captures them in a kind of chorus of life and death that has now set her free.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-57003-284-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
LEARNING TO FLY
by Mary Lee Settle

- BOOK REVIEW
SPANISH RECOGNITIONS
by Mary Lee Settle

- BOOK REVIEW
CHOICES
by Mary Lee Settle

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.