A searing visit to a Dickensian world of cruelty and indifference to children.
Debut memoirist Louise eloquently indicts a family and community that abused and neglected her.
Worst of all, the author states in her colloquial first-person narrative, they made her feel unwanted. Regina’s teenaged mother, Ruby, already had another daughter, born when she was 13, so the new baby was handed off to Big Mama, a foster mother in Austin, Texas, who provided the bare necessities for the children in her care. Beaten badly by Big Mama’s daughter, Regina ran away to the woman she believed to be her father’s mother, who was not only abusive but also unwilling to raise her; soon she was back with Big Mama. Louise describes a troubled childhood that included truancy and rape. Initially happy when she was moved from Big Mama to her biological mother, now living in North Carolina with two sons by another man, Regina soon learned that Ruby favored her sons, and she endured sexual and physical abuse from Ruby’s current boyfriend. She moved to California to be with her father, married to a white woman, but he was no better, and 12-year-old Regina landed in a county shelter. There, she met Claire Kennedy, an employee who treated her with kindness, appreciation, and growing affection. Regina wanted to stay in the shelter near Claire, but the authorities insisted she be placed in foster homes, oppressive and uncaring places from which she ran away. Another hurtful blow landed when her parents gave up custody and she became a ward of the state. Regina, whose experiences with black families had not been good, longed to live permanently with Claire, but the state objected to a white woman adopting her. The end of this volume, first in a planned pair, finds the traumatized girl still in limbo.
A searing visit to a Dickensian world of cruelty and indifference to children.Pub Date: June 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52910-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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