While the relentless losses, injustices, and unkindnesses make for disturbing reading—as does the author’s ungratefulness...
The Guadeloupian novelist (Windward Heights, 1999, etc.) remembers her privileged but harsh childhood, and the long-coming compassion and awareness that arose from it.
Winner of the 1999 Prix Yourcenar (for a French-language work by a US resident), Tales is comprised of 17 vignettes that reveal the intricacies of Guadeloupian society and the matching complexities of the author’s parents and how they made her a wary rebel throughout her youth. Born into a prominent black family whose parents believed they were the “most brilliant and the most intelligent people alive,” Condé (French Caribbean Literature/Columbia Univ.) is the last of eight children, and from childhood feels slighted by the “commonplace incidents” surrounding her birth, which leave her with the desire to return to the womb and “rediscover a happiness” she knew she had lost “forever.” School and everyday life bring little comfort: She alternately faces the injustice of being beaten by a mysterious boy for her family’s inconsiderate treatment of a servant and by a white girl for being black. She is allowed to play with French-speaking children when the family is in Paris, but forbidden to play with Creole mates in Guadeloupe. This mix leads Condé, at age 10, to determine her parents “alienated,” and vow not to be so herself. Thus she spent the next several years rebelling, coming to some solace only as she accepted her mother in her old age and embraced her Caribbean identity. Throughout, Condé relates her experiences with the decisiveness of youth and the imperiousness of her mother, whose complexity she seems to have inherited as much as the arthritis she decries. Fittingly, the author dedicates this work to her mother.
While the relentless losses, injustices, and unkindnesses make for disturbing reading—as does the author’s ungratefulness and cramped take on life—this is a useful look at the psychological consequences of intolerance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-264-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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IN THE NEWS
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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