A sweet, inoffensive, rambling oral history of a writer’s respectable, hardworking, warmly dignified parents. Marriage never...
The Booker Prize–winner and the Irish working-class’s Marcel Proust (A Star Called Henry, 1999, etc.) offers a nonfiction account of his parents’ reminiscences “about the people they were before they were my parents,” continuing through WWII and into their senior years.
And what a book it might have been. But fans will search in vain through this rambling collection of anecdotal recollections for Doyle’s hilariously unsentimental portraits of street-corner romantics, dizzy dreamers, and righteous fools. Instead of crafting a dual biography using his novelist’s talent for wry observation and revealing detail, Doyle lets his parents talk—and talk and talk—about themselves in long, discursive passages unrelieved by description or analysis, supplemented by black-and-white photos and occasional annotations. Granted, Roderick “Rory” Doyle, a newspaper compositor and later a teacher of the printer’s trade, and Ita Bolger, secretary in a medical school’s pathology department, have their son’s gift for a good story. Their memories of early hardships, childhood chums, dark houses overflowing with relatives, the purchases they made with the savings from their first jobs (a briar pipe, lavender soap), and their courtship (he was a little drunk during their first dance; she grew to admire him as they took long walks around Dublin) are likable and sympathetic, and there will be no dry eyes after reading that Ita mourns her son Anthony (who died the day after he was born) by refusing ever again to pray to the saint she named him for. Though Doyle says, in a preface, that he left out many of the stories about him and his siblings, what’s missing from this family album are the deeper glimpses into character that might be found in those less comforting, ignoble incidents that a loving son may not have wanted to put into print.
A sweet, inoffensive, rambling oral history of a writer’s respectable, hardworking, warmly dignified parents. Marriage never sounded quite so good.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03204-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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