Like its author, this is a hybrid—both casual and entertaining.
A series of travelogues and memoirs linked by the subjects of race and identity.
In 11 pieces ranging in length from mere paragraphs to several pages, Rekdal writes with candor and poetic deftness about experiences in her distant and recent life as a woman of half-Norwegian and half-Chinese descent. In Taipei she traveled with her Chinese mother (making one half of an odd pair whose intimacy confused concierges and shopkeepers), while in Korea (where she taught English at a girls’ high school in a small, conservative town) her lessons evolve into arguments about gender, sexuality, and their attendant mores. Rekdal doesn’t shirk from putting her inner self on the line; her intimate relationships with boyfriends and parents are subject to the same gimlet gaze as foreign places and people—and, depending on whether her travels are within the boundaries of the US or within the bank of her childhood memories, the tone of her collection shifts from the light-hearted and ironic to the ambiguous and even tragic. (A long memoir of Rekdal’s sixth-grade friendship with another student—a black girl from a white foster-family whose own struggle with self and world exacts a price—edges the story into deeper waters, for example.) Her account cannot quite be considered a memoir, nor is it entirely a collection of essays. Its cumulative but delicate strength lies primarily in the author’s narrative and descriptive skills (she has published poems and essays in several small journals), as well as its refusal to be anything more than anecdotal and matter-of-fact. The impish, nothing-to-it-ness of Mark Salzman’s Iron and Silk (as well as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted ) comes to mind.
Like its author, this is a hybrid—both casual and entertaining.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40937-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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