An excellent memoir. Sayrafiezadeh is a writer to watch.
The poignant, brilliantly told story of a unique and troubled childhood.
Granta and Paris Review contributor Sayrafiezadeh writes captivatingly of his strange, lonely upbringing as the child of radical socialists in 1970s New York. His Iranian-born father, who abandoned the family when the author was an infant, and American-Jewish mother fervently believed that the United States would soon be transformed by a bloody revolution, and both worked tirelessly for the Socialist Workers Party to bring about that revolution. Sayrafiezadeh writes of dreamlike days standing on street corners with his mother as she tried to sell copies of the party newspaper, The Militant. He grew up in grinding poverty, not because his parents had no choice—both were highly educated—but because of their dogmatic anti-capitalist views. For their young son, the vow of poverty meant personal deprivation and, often, bitterness. Sayrafiezadeh movingly relates his consuming craving as a preschooler for grapes, forbidden in his household because of a boycott supporting a migrant workers’ strike. Some of his stories are almost surreal. When he asked his mother to buy him a skateboard, she replied, “Once the revolution comes, everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” One night when she had a meeting to attend, she left her four-year-old son home with a “comrade” she had met only two days earlier who sexually abused the boy. Later chapters detail the author’s difficult relationship with his colorful but standoffish father, whom he got to know only when he was nearly an adult, as well as the prejudices he faced as an Iranian-American during the hostage crisis of 1979–’80. An enormously talented writer, Sayrafiezadeh ably conveys a complex blend of affection and anger toward his deeply flawed parents in deftly controlled prose.
An excellent memoir. Sayrafiezadeh is a writer to watch.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34068-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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