A memoir by Alexander (Nampally Road, 1990), tracing her life from childhood in India through youth and education in Africa and England to marriage and motherhood in Manhattan. Alexander's desire to overcome the ``torment'' of her ``multiple migrations'' in order to tell her story, however, is undercut by overwriting and an oceanic sentimentality. Beginning the story of her life with the story of this book's writing—an editor's pitch in an Upper West Side cafe; sleepless nights in the author's apartment spent assembling the ``fragments of a broken geography''—Alexander weaves back and forth between present and past, mixing metaphors and memories with abandon. ``I sit here writing, for I know that time does not come fluid and whole into my trembling hands. All that is here comes piecemeal, though sometimes the joints have fallen into place miraculously, as if the heavens had opened and mango trees fruited in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway.'' Born in 1951, the first of three daughters of a meteorologist, Alexander was raised in southern India before her father was transferred to the Sudan when she was five. From her summer visits back to her ancestral home, Alexander reconstructs her childhood idyll: There are her adoring and wise maternal grandfather in his garden of mango trees and cashews; her shrewd but affection old ayah (nanny); and the self-contained, genteel world of the joint family household. Forays into the social and political issues raised by postcolonialism and feminism occur throughout the text, but Alexander focuses on her own cultural identity crisis as metaphor for them. In her decision to wear a sari one day and a pair of jeans the next, she implicates the future of cultural difference and the integrity of the nation state. Alexander's view of herself as a sociopolitical microcosm seems far-fetched and self-absorbed; as a result, what might have been a revealing memoir remains a carelessly crafted reverie. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55861-058-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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