Dramatic but shallow.
Expanded from her series of articles in the Newark Star-Ledger, Pulitzer Prize finalist Fisher’s first book follows freshman roommates, badly burned in the January 2000 Seton Hall University dorm fire, as they recover and rebuild their lives.
Writing in a straightforward, reportorial style, the author chronicles the ordeal of Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, illustrates their lighthearted personalities and loving friendship and rounds out the picture by including the perspectives of their families, the head of the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Hospital and the burn nurses. This action-driven, summarizing approach works well for straight narrative, but falls short in examining the complex psychological difficulties Shawn and Alvaro suffered after experiencing such a massive trauma so early in their lives. Essential questions are answered simplistically. What is it like for a carefree, handsome young man to be suddenly disfigured and to lose his youthful sense of invincibility? It’s difficult, the author tells us. How do parents cope when their beloved sons might die? Big surprise: Well-adjusted people do better than anxious ones. The author glosses over an unplanned pregnancy and the undercurrent of class conflict in the attendant arson case. Fisher’s heroic portraits of Shawn and Alvaro are similarly airbrushed; more recognition of their human fallibility would increase the text’s realism and impact. The strongest material deals with Alvaro’s 17-year-old girlfriend Angie, too young to deal well with the changes his injuries bring. Fisher’s account of their devolving relationship enhances readers’ emotional understanding of the fire’s effect on its victims in a way that the rest of the book does not.
Dramatic but shallow.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-06621-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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