A mixed bag, redeemed by the author’s portrait of his father, rendered with rawboned honesty and heartache.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Bragg returns to the rural Alabama home turf of Ava’s Man (2001) and All Over But the Shoutin’ (1997) with a double narrative that braids two emotional journeys.
A recent marriage and the baggage that came with it—a ten-year-old stepson who still carried around his “blanky”—led the author to revisit the story of his father Charlie, whom he had previously depicted as an improvident, violent drunk who blighted the lives of Bragg’s mother and two brothers. Here, extensive interviews with friends and relatives of the “Prince of Frogtown” (the neighborhood where Charlie and his brothers lived and battled in the streets) have produced a more dynamic, if not necessarily nobler portrait. In youth, Charlie drag-raced, swept away his best friend’s girl and even stole the keys to the county jail. That was before combat in the Korean War, repeated run-ins with the local sheriff, an increasing taste for alcohol and a TB diagnosis. With considerable discernment, the author traces how his family was formed by a blue-collar town and its hardscrabble past, marked by Indian wars and the Civil War. His native area’s cadences, smooth and rich as bourbon, seep naturally into Bragg’s prose: Paternal grandfather Bob “never met a man he wouldn’t fight at least twice, if insulted, and he intended to slap all the pretty off Handsome Bill Lively’s face.” Alternating chapters on his unnamed stepson, by contrast, resound more with the annoyance Bragg feels at the start than the love he professes at the end, at which point the author sounds uncomfortably self-congratulatory about the maturation of his stepson, now “the man I rushed him to be.”
A mixed bag, redeemed by the author’s portrait of his father, rendered with rawboned honesty and heartache.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4040-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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