Lively's experience as an English child in Egypt (and briefly, Sudan, Palestine, and exotic en routes) is perceived and pursued through the stubborn opacity of adult memory, longing for ``the rainbow experience we all have lost but of which we occasionally retrieve a brilliant glimpse.'' It is novelist Lively's (Cleopatra's Sister, 1993, etc.) aim to discuss ``the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930's and 1940's.'' She richly and elegantly succeeds. The child's vision of the world, declares Lively, is anarchistic, focusing on the moment; the child sees an unpredictable world in which anything is possible. The Egyptian landscape (bright green, gray/green, and tawny) held ``endless pilgrimages'' of animals and people, the smell of dust and dung. About the different ways of the natives, the intimate yet somewhat puzzling relationship with servants, Lively writes: ``This was the world. How could it be otherwise?'' To the young Penelope, her parents—career banker father, fashionably idle mother—were ``peripheral''; nanny Lucy was her whole emotional world. Like every child, Penelope was faced with the complex codes of adult society. Certainly English was best, but what about an English friend in the Brownies who shouldn't be invited to tea? (Lively recalls puzzled but quiet acquiescence.) Throughout the tumult of desert wars, Penelope and Lucy struggle to conquer math and history; in Cairo (the pyramids were after all just pyramids), they feed an elephant who accepts peanuts with a trunk ``warm and hairy and deft.'' There's an interesting ``collision'' between recovered perception and received history, however, in a nine-year-old's view of Charles de Gaulle, sponge in hand, on his way to the bath of a Jerusalem hotel. There is such strength in Lively's ``statements'' from the past—the long desert roads, sensuous Khartoum, Alexandria—that when she records the 1945 return to England—''the inconceivable cold, the perpetually leaking sky''—the reader feels the chill. A quite stunning meditation on the archaeology of memory and time's predations—persistent concerns in Lively's recent, superior fiction. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017106-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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