Wins points for breaking the cultural mold, but a little too plain and unadorned.
A British journalist comes to terms with his immigrant upbringing and love of Bruce Springsteen, each crippling in its own way.
Manzoor grew up in working-class Luton and, as related in his sketchy memoir, fit neither the molds set out by the society around him nor those of his Muslim parents. Early on, it became clear that he wasn’t going to be a drone like his father, a tough-as-nails factory worker with a jones for self-improvement, or marry a good Pakistani girl like his long-suffering, guilt-dispensing mother. In a series of eight slightly overlapping essays, Manzoor tells the story of growing up as a young Pakistani boy destined for backbreaking labor and adult responsibilities, only to have his life forever changed by hearing Springsteen’s music in college. Later on, he became a journalist for the BBC and the Guardian, but what really mattered was The Boss. Each chapter opens with a quote from the appropriate Springsteen lyric, and there’s no passage in Manzoor’s life so pressing or important that he can’t find a way to relate The Boss to it. Springsteen even appears when Manzoor discusses his troubled relationship with religion: “I wanted to be a Muslim like Philip Roth was a Jew or Bruce Springsteen was a Catholic.” Although Manzoor maintains a healthy sense of self-mocking humility and does an excellent job portraying his fantastically complicated striver of a father, his listless prose eventually makes this short book less rewarding than it should be.
Wins points for breaking the cultural mold, but a little too plain and unadorned.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38802-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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