In a memorable memoir reflecting identity, von Ziegesar tells of his stepbrother’s wounds, both psychic and grievously...
A scion of the East Coast upper crust contends with his family, especially one particularly difficult kinsman.
Screenwriter and filmmaker von Ziegesar’s younger brother is also named Peter von Ziegesar. To be precise, they are stepbrothers, and they are called Big Peter and Little Peter. Though Big Peter had been known to occasionally inhale lines of dope, it was Little Peter who was troubled—homeless and either schizophrenic or in the thrall of Asperger’s syndrome. The story of the stepbrothers reveals how they affected and, in some ways, reflected each other’s lives. From a world of posh boarding schools, nannies and yachts, Big Peter made it to a life with a family at home in Brooklyn. Little Peter, from the same roots, simply dropped from the proud family tree. From the tribe’s compound at Peacock Point on Long Island Sound and a comfortable world, he wandered, homeless, bedding in damp cardboard boxes around the country. The folk who populate the stepbrothers’ blended families include a philandering father, imperious grande dames, distracted siblings and feckless mothers; here, too, are hip friends alien to Peacock Point’s moneyed moorings. It’s as if characters wandered out of an Auchincloss novel to encounter Kerouac’s bunch. The vivid, frequently elegiac memory piece, with a touch of imaginative reconstruction, brings to life some diverse relations and a memorable homeless protagonist in particular. The talented writer snares readers throughout with scores of pop and literary references—a device that can lead to minor gaffes as, for example, when he names “Pancho Villa” as Don Quixote’s sidekick.
In a memorable memoir reflecting identity, von Ziegesar tells of his stepbrother’s wounds, both psychic and grievously physical, occasionally with fraternal irascibility and more frequently with candid understanding.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-59298-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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