A gripping tale hampered by middling execution.
An up-close journalistic investigation of street families: groups of young adults who live on the seamy outskirts of dozens of American cities and towns.
Denfeld (Kill the Body, The Head Will Fall, 1997, etc.) traces the violent career of James Nelson, a street kid who committed murder at age 16. Paroled after a decade in prison, Nelson headed straight back to the streets of Portland, Ore. Younger teens were attracted to him, and together they formed the Thantos Family. Denfeld shows that street families live according to their own internally coherent codes of conduct: Gender roles are rigid, and if you gossip, flirt, snitch or challenge authority, consequences come swiftly. The author does a remarkable job of humanizing the youth who joined the Thantos Family. The most pathetic of them is Jessica Williams, severely developmentally disabled by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. In her 20s, Jessica fell in with Nelson, though she continued intermittently to go home to her worried adoptive parents. Eventually, deciding to punish her for various made-up infractions, three members of Jessica’s street family finished off an hours-long beating by knifing her, stomping on her chest, dousing her with lighter fluid and torching her. Many of the minors involved in her murder are, or soon will be, paroled, and the author predicts a bleak future: They “will take their old school credits—and prison experiences—back to the streets, where they will become the street fathers and mothers of new families, just as James Nelson did.” Denfeld excels at character development, but her pacing is weak, providing little of the narrative tension one would expect from a drama that climaxes with a gruesome murder. The Thantos Family’s story also cries out for more careful thinking. Suggesting that street kids are “representative of a society where young adults are encouraged to immerse themselves in fantasy games” is not the same as sustained analysis.
A gripping tale hampered by middling execution.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58648-309-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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