A “collaboration” between historian White (Univ. of Washington) and his mother, Sara, this blends formal historical research and the oral tradition. The bare bones of White’s narrative follow the family’s travails via the stories Sara and others remember being told as children, plus those they’ve lived through and generated themselves. Oral recollections, though, often fail to jive among the tellers, much less with the historical record. Therein lies the richness of this somewhat sluggishly told saga. Family members don’t even agree as to why Sara Walsh left Countty Kerrey, Ireland, in 1936 at the age of 16 to join her father and other relatives on Chicago’s South Side. She claims that she didn’t want to leave, though she hated the work on the family’s small farm, as well as working as a kind of indentured servant since the age of 11. Her father, a streetcar repairman in Chicago, had left Ireland years earlier for vague reasons of his own. Sara’s story of the train ride from New York to Chicago is a classic. With nothing to eat or drink and with no idea how to use the bathroom, she was “more absorbed in her hungers and discomforts than in America unfolding past the windows.” Things were strained for the extended family living on South Mozart Street. During the war Sara worked at Chicago Municipal Airport. On a junket to New Orleans she met her future husband, Harry White, a cum laude graduate of Harvard. Their marriage led to bitter clashes between her Irish Catholic relatives and his Jewish family. White hints that his bad memories of his father and his maternal grandmother’s refusal to speak ill of him was “the cruelest work in the book,” but he lets it go: “She insists on her memory.” A story so typical in so many ways profits from White’s personal conflict over the desire to trust familial recollection and the historian’s insistence on fact. (4 b&w photos; 2 maps)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8090-8071-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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