Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban “bad old days.”
The barbed tale of a writer’s beginnings, embarrassed yet fascinated by melodramatic, bohemian attorney parents.
Novelist Siegel (All Will Be Revealed, 2007, etc.) dramatizes a surreal upbringing fraught with deception. His mother pushed him toward art and culture, while his father sank into malfeasance. “We were the kind of family that ate out a lot, because home was too rancorous and depressing, and we tended to be a little nicer to each other in public,” he writes. The author’s obese, grandiose father was jailed for too-close involvement with his clients, including counterculture radicals, drug dealers, and the Hells Angels. “In this atmosphere,” he writes, “we could be the normal ones, the representatives of middle-class decency.” After prison, his father rebuilt his practice, but with reduced reputation and income. When one client gave him illicit cash with which to flee the country, he squandered it on junk food and fancy clothes. “I’m not sure why he decided to stay; it’s very possible that he was simply too broken to leave,” writes Siegel. The family’s chaotic domestic life took strange turns, including the adoption of an abused boy to whom, against the author’s expectations, his parents were devoted: “We liked seeing ourselves as the family in charge of the orphanage, full of beautiful waifs.” Still, Siegel’s father continued to neglect his health and responsibilities, and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s long after his behavior became erratic. Breaking away, the author became consumed with Asian culture, living in Japan while laboring over a novel about his father’s crimes, unable to find an authentic voice. Siegel displays his strengths in this memoir: lean, acute prose and sharply recalled environmental details of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s. He examines the familial ties that bind with love and exasperation, and his portrait of his family’s self-destructive contradictions is probing and memorable. The sections focused on his own intellectual growth can seem comparatively meandering and repetitive.
Dramatic, keenly observed memoir of familial entropy set against the urban “bad old days.”Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-037-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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