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A BROTHER’S JOURNEY

SURVIVING A CHILDHOOD OF ABUSE: A MEMOIR

Corroborates David’s memories, but provides no special insight into abuse.

Gut-wrenching recollections of the horrendous, years-long abuse inflicted on the author by his alcoholic, emotionally disturbed mother, and of his participation in the similar torture that his brother David described in A Child Called “It” (1999).

Pelzer has a guilty conscience, it seems, and so—for therapeutic reasons—one of his aims here is to explain why he was a coconspirator in the mental and physical tormenting of his older brother some 30 years ago. As a young child, he states, he lived in constant fear that he would replace his brother as the one of the five sons their mother singled out for particularly brutal treatment. In the interest of self-preservation, then, he became Mom’s accomplice, purposely creating situations that would arouse her wrath and lead to harsh punishment of David. After a time, he reports, he came to relish “the bitter sweetness of causing him harm.” Finally, in 1972, the authorities removed David from the family, and eight-year-old Richard, as he had feared, became the new object of his mother’s cruelty. Meanwhile, another brother took his place as her “Little Nazi.” What Pelzer was subjected to beggars the imagination: Mom’s tactics included bloody violence, degradation, and humiliation. Sometimes, though, the author’s memory seems suspect: Could anyone physically swallow four mouthfuls of Tabasco sauce, as he asserts he was once forced to do? It’s also hard to understand why no one intervened, since Pelzer makes it clear that relatives were aware of his mother’s drunkenness and mental instability, neighbors witnessed the beatings, a nurse at a local hospital recognized as child abuse the battery his body had received, and school authorities had previously seen the need to rescue his brother David. The author’s explanation is that community awareness of child abuse is much higher today than it was in the 1970s. If so, disturbing accounts by survivors like this one must take some credit for the change.

Corroborates David’s memories, but provides no special insight into abuse.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2005

ISBN: 0-446-53368-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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