Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take.
An unsentimental and thus telling memoir by the middle of three sisters who grew up in a series of foster homes in Fresno, California.
Their father was already in prison for a bumbled robbery attempt when their mother went to a movie with a boyfriend and didn’t come back. It was 1970: Paula was only four years old, Teresa was six, Penny three. Herein are Paula’s memories of their years in foster care, moving with her sisters from family to family until their 1974 placement with Bub and Hilde at Lindbergh Acres, a rundown ranch where they lived for almost 11 years. Earlier foster families ranged from the bizarre to the abusive. The Spinozas had a seven-year-old son who ran through the house clad only in a makeshift superhero cape. Mrs. Clapp was addicted to purple, and Mr. Clapp made sexual overtures to Paula and perhaps to her sisters as well; they never talked about it. The Fredricksons bought them bicycles and had family meetings and seemed to actually love them, but sent them away after only a few months. At their last placement, Hilde set rules that no one could fathom, occasionally beat them, and sometimes hid their clothes, but Bub was fun-loving and affectionate, and they were provided with food, clothing, toys, and their own horses. Several chapters are devoted to the sisters’ adolescence, no more or less tumultuous than most, although given an extra edge by Hilde’s increasingly unstable behavior and the ever-present threat of being moved to yet another foster home. Throughout it all, the sisters remained together, an extraordinary achievement in the annals of foster care. They were living together and attending college when their mother finally resurfaced in 1986 to establish a tentative relationship the author admits still baffles her today.
Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-59742-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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