A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.
O’Faolain, mistress of the memoir (Almost There, 2003, etc.), meets her match in fellow Irishwoman Chicago May, feisty turn-of-the-century feminist and queen of crooks.
O’Faolain’s biography of May Duignan, who fled County Longford, Ireland, for New York in 1890, is as much about the author, her beleaguered Irish clan and the tribulations of Irish emigration as it is about her notorious subject. O’Faolain manages to weave the destiny of an entire people into the flight of auburn-haired, buxom 19-year-old May, from her impoverished home in Edenmore, as her mother was delivering yet another baby the family could ill afford to raise. May fled with the family’s savings; the fugitive booked cabin class to New York, rather than steerage, in the first of her devil-may-care acts that would come to characterize her in the new world. From Nebraska, where she supposedly had an uncle, to cities teeming with vice such as Chicago and New York, as well as cities overseas, she capitalized on her good looks by learning quickly how to make a sucker of an admirer, and soon excelled as a “badger” in luring men into rooms where they would be fleeced. Flush from her prostitution earnings, ruthless May—“the tart who could bite diamonds out of tie-pins”—fell in with safe-cracker Eddie Guerin, and their American Express heist in Paris proved her eventual downfall. O’Faolain quotes extensively from May’s end-of-life, picaresque 1928 autobiography, Chicago May, Her Story, which the author found in the New York Public Library. Employing her own autobiographical skills and intimacy with Irish sob stories (see Are You Somebody?, 1998), O’Faolain speculates endlessly on May’s motivation and intention, tracking years of brutal incarceration, fly-by-night grifting and illness, ending in May’s heartbreaking “disillusion with the act of autobiography itself.”
A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-320-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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