The discontinuous history of an extended black family from New Orleans, which, for lack of authorial perspectives, amounts to little more than a dreary recital of harsh truths. In 1979, Bates (Writing/Harvard) met the clan's patriarch, Collis Phillips (then 70), at a New Orelans gym where the author had gone to learn boxing. In-your-face realities soon dashed Bates's prizefighting fantasies, but he became intrigued by the personable old trainer who had not discouraged him. Until Phillips died in 1989, Bates took a ringside seat at the Phillips family's rites of passage, learning much of their story. The father of six, Phillips had earned local celebrity as a club fighter during the Depression. While working as a trainer after WW II, though, he lost a leg as the result of a gunshot wound inflicted by an angry daughter—and he had scarcely better luck with his other children. One son committed suicide, and two others (including a middleweight contender) wound up sentenced to long terms in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. By and large, succeeding generations fared badly with either life or the law. Alcoholism, crime, divorce, drug addiction, illiteracy, jail, and menial jobs were the common denominators of their individual fates as fighting arenas, courtrooms, lockups, and public-housing projects circumscribed wasted lives that often ended in early graves. Here, Bates seems to believe that the mass of painful detail he has compiled, apparently at no small personal cost, speaks for itself. The accretion of grim particulars on essentially unsympathetic characters, however, soon becomes mind- numbing and, eventually, meaningless. Nor does it help that the author eschews interpretive commentary, engages in jolting time- shifts, and couples his own self-consciously literary style with intrusive attempts to reproduce the slurred speech of uneducated southern blacks. Although there's a certain interest to the overlong narrative's raw material, without any effort by Bates to shape it, the annals of the Phillips family are little more involving than matter-of-fact police reports.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-25047-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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