An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
Calling himself “a misfit Englishman…with a taste for remote places,” the author of God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (2008) buys a former plantation house, deep in the Mississippi Delta, and thus commences an education—his and ours.
When journalist and TV host Grant decided to move to Holes County, “the poorest county in America’s poorest state,” neither he nor his girlfriend, Mariah, had ever been to the region. Nonetheless, they bought their place near the Yazoo River in an area called Pluto and immediately begin receiving tutelage from nature and neighbors. The author provides accounts of battles with cottonmouths, armadillos, and biting insects, of deer hunting (Mariah, once a vegetarian, changed her tastes), of struggles with heat and humidity and remoteness. They were stunned to discover the generosity of neighbors, both black and white. The Delta, which is more than 80 percent black, still manifests—as Grant repeatedly shows—many lingering troubles from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond. Among the most useful early advice he received: compartmentalize. Overlook the noxious opinions of your neighbors; enjoy the good parts. So he and Mariah did precisely that. Throughout the course of the year’s residence that Grant records, he takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church, Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Prison), a school that’s doing pretty well (most are not), and a local political campaign. We sit in on visits with local musicians and local raconteurs, whose tales, at times, tend to go on a bit, testing readers’ patience. But the issue that repeatedly emerges—and how can it not?—is race. Continually, we hear the views of locals, the author, and Mariah, and we discover that corrosive racism is still alive and well.
An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0964-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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