A heartfelt, inspiring, and relevant memoir.
An award-winning author’s account of how she became the first person in her family to attend college and live the dream of becoming a writer.
When Grande (The Distance Between Us, 2012, etc.), a former undocumented Mexican immigrant, left Los Angeles in 1996 for the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was both excited and afraid. Two older siblings had dropped out of college, broken her alcoholic father’s heart, and made him “[give] up on me.” He had also exiled them from his life to facilitate the return of the second wife he had divorced. By the time Grande left community college for UCSC, her main sources of emotional support were a professor and a boyfriend who had been accepted to another college. At first, the author felt out of place on the nearly all-white UCSC campus; gradually, she found a place among other Hispanic students and in the university’s creative writing program. But the ghosts of her past continued to haunt her. When, for example, the mother who had abandoned her sent Grande’s sister back to Mexico for “running wild,” Grande brought the young girl to Santa Cruz only to be profoundly disappointed by her sister's bad behavior. After graduation, she returned to LA idealistic, believing that a degree would automatically grant her success. Instead, she floundered, unsure of how to begin her writing career. Then she stumbled into a teaching job. She began to make her dream of a middle-class life a reality, but at the expense of her writing. Now a single mother but no less determined to succeed on her terms, she earned a place in the Emerging Writers program, where she finally found the creative path she had been seeking all along. Candid and emotionally complex, Grande’s book celebrates one woman’s tenacity in the face of hardship and heartbreak while offering hope to other immigrants as they “fight to remain” and make their voices heard in a changing America.
A heartfelt, inspiring, and relevant memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7142-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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