The resilient lilt to Tucker’s writing allows him, and the reader, to negotiate even the direst moments without despondency.
Debut memoir by Washington Post staffer Tucker describes his attempt with his wife to adopt a sick and abandoned child, setting their saga against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s social disintegration.
Tucker had seen his share of desperate locales during his years as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa for the Detroit Free Press. A white man who grew up in Mississippi, Tucker in 1998 was living with his Detroit-born, African-American wife Vita in Harare. The Zimbabwean capital was devastated by AIDS: perhaps as much as one-quarter of the population between 25 and 44 had the disease, young parents were dying in droves, and the nation’s traditional social welfare net, the extended family, was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of abandoned children. Neely and Vita were working as volunteers at the Chinyaradzo Children’s Home when an infant girl, only days old, was brought in. She had been left in chest-high grass a mile from the nearest village. Tucker’s description of their efforts to adopt Chipo (as the orphanage’s matron named her) limns a situation that was part theater of the absurd, part theater of cruelty. Social norms and suspicions conspired to thwart the couple’s every good intention; the simple fact was, he writes, “[Zimbabwe President] Mugabe’s administration wanted very little to do with Americans” and was particularly hostile to foreign journalists. Files were lost and found, the Tuckers were accused of trying to buy the child, the police harassed them. Neely’s position as a correspondent became ever more tenuous; he ultimately chucked his job to concentrate on the adoption process. His tale of love in a time of great political unease has a happy ending when the couple finally flies out of Harare with Chipo eight days before Zimbabweans reject Mugabe’s autocratic new constitution and his followers erupt in violence.
The resilient lilt to Tucker’s writing allows him, and the reader, to negotiate even the direst moments without despondency.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60976-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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