Stay tuned for the finale.
The fourth and penultimate volume in Sattouf’s epic graphic memoir.
With this installment, which follows The Arab of the Future: The Circumcision Years: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987 (2018), the impressive scope and scale of the series becomes clearer. It has taken three volumes for the author to get to his 10th birthday, and the opening pages of this book find him living with his mother and siblings in her native France while his father pursues his fantasies of wealth, financial independence, and early retirement as a professor in Saudi Arabia. Here, Sattouf’s father seems more determinedly Muslim than ever, convinced that the family’s future lies in the Middle East, where he finds both the morals and the prospects for a future higher. “We’ll live like lords,” he insists. However, the author’s mother remained resistant, seeing a better life for herself and a better education for her children in the West, and specifically in France. Meanwhile, the young Sattouf shuttled between the cultures; he found his father’s religion strange and forgot how to speak his native tongue while immersed in the French school system. On one visit to his father, he was told, “You’re a French kid with an Arab name. You’re not a real Arab.” He also endured homosexual epithets, partly because others found the way he spoke effeminate and partly because of his predilection for drawing—the art that may well provide the key to his identity across cultures. It’s clear this was an awkward time, as early adolescence is for most. During the five years of this narrative, Sattouf will reach his midteens, experience some sexual confusion and awakening, see his hair turn from blond to brown, develop an ungainly body with an oversized head, and go from being “pretty cute” to “the ugliest boy in the class.” Nor can he find any stability outside himself, as the center of his parents’ marriage cannot hold, and international relations find the West and Middle East in mortal combat.
Stay tuned for the finale.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15066-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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