Sassy, inspiring, and uplifting.
An African-American female comedian recounts how she escaped poverty and a life of crime to become a respected performer.
One of five children born to a single mother, Williams spent the first years of her life growing up in her grandfather’s illegal liquor house in Decatur, Georgia. Petty crime was a way of life: when she was 8, her mother, who did “anything for a little extra cash…except get a regular job,” taught Williams to pickpocket the drunks who visited the liquor house. Her grandfather’s arrest for attempted murder forced her and her family to move out. Surviving on her mother's meager welfare checks, Williams and her siblings routinely scammed churches for free food. Her mother then took up with a man who kept the family fed but sexually abused both Williams and her older sister. At age 12, Williams became the girlfriend of a married 20-year-old man, Derrick. She gave birth to the first of two children she would have with him and dropped out of school a year later. Derrick supported them with odd jobs and later with money he made as a drug dealer. When he went to jail, Williams started selling drugs; soon she had a thriving business. She made enough money to support herself, her children, and relatives who joined her small family to escape homes that resembled “the seven circles of hell.” Williams continued dealing even after she met and married a man who “didn’t know shit about case workers, eviction notices or eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner.” At 23, she earned her GED and sought job training. When she discovered that her criminal record made it impossible to secure respectable employment, a caseworker casually remarked that Williams had a gift for making the tragic seem hilarious. Both savagely honest and often genuinely funny, this is the story of how a resilient woman survived a harrowing early life and found unexpected salvation through humor.
Sassy, inspiring, and uplifting.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240730-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
