A beautiful story of real-life redemption.
This honest, brisk, and ultimately very moving memoir offers a strong alternative to the stereotype of the “playa”: the irresponsible young black man who preys on women and nonchalantly fathers children out of wedlock.
“I’ve been obsessed with being a husband and father since I was seven years old,” writes Datcher, a poet and journalist, now presumably in his 30s. “Quiet as it’s kept, many young black men have the same obsession. Picket fence dreams. A played-out metaphor in the white community but one still secretly riding the bench in black neighborhoods nationwide.” Datcher grew up in poor areas in southern California, where most of his friends were fatherless, like him. “We rarely talked about our missing fathers. Instead, we poured our passion into our skateboards, our marbles, and our mothers. Yet the unspoken sparkled from our eyes whenever any neighborhood men showed us attention.” The son of a diligent, devoted mother who teaches him self-respect, Datcher becomes a rare success story, a good student and athlete who attends Berkeley and later UCLA before launching his career as a freelance journalist and community activist, and who is committed to the idea of eventually finding love, getting married, and having a family. Then a woman he’s only casually involved with gets pregnant, and for a time it seems that Datcher has blown his own most fervent dream: He’s going to have a child out of wedlock, just as his own (unknown) father did, just as he promised himself he’d never do. Will he rise to occasion and become responsible for his actions, or wallow in crushing self-pity? Throughout his self-portrait, Datcher is hard on himself for his mistakes and misjudgments. But he’s also suitably forgiving—both of himself for hurting people he cares about, and of others who do him wrong (such as his girlfriend, who turns out to have lied about his being her baby’s father). And when it ultimately looks as if he’s found the true love and commitment he’s striven for, he approaches it with humility and hard-earned maturity as well as joyous expectation.
A beautiful story of real-life redemption.Pub Date: March 5, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-171-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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