A thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir.
A mother’s debut account of abducting her child to save him from his abusive father.
In 1973, at the height of the feminist movement, Murphy met Guy Johnson, the son of famed author Maya Angelou, through her best friend, Mary. Soon, all three of them engaged in an untraditional love triangle, living in relative harmony and eking out a meager existence with marginal bouts of employment and creative ingenuity. In the early chapters, Murphy, in succinct, articulate prose, relates her tumultuous relationship with Johnson. She initially dismissed his abrasive personality as challenging but soon realized that he had quite a sadistic streak. When Murphy became pregnant, she hoped that Johnson’s attitude toward her would soften, but it was not to be—indeed, as her pregnancy progressed, Johnson’s anger toward her only increased. The author adeptly recounts the intense, fearful incidents that she endured just before her son Colin was born. Johnson, she writes, angrily proclaimed that Murphy was unfit to raise their child, and eventually the verbal abuse turned physical, forcing her to leave their home and seek a divorce. She writes of finding herself helpless against Johnson’s attempts to remove her son from her life completely, thanks to Johnson’s ties to the community and his mother’s fame and abundant finances. After Johnson badly beat her and she lost her court battles, she took her son and went into hiding for four years with the aid of her friends and four sisters. During her years underground, Murphy learned a lot about herself and, through her work with women’s shelters and other programs, helped other abused women. After a former friend turned her in, she reexamined her initial motives and feelings that caused her to run, and, through a 12-step program, came to terms with many of her personal issues and firmly held convictions, which allowed her to finally begin healing. Throughout this engaging memoir, she deftly tells her life story—from her abusive childhood to her seemingly selfless act of saving her son—with meticulous attention to detail (“I flipped [my Social Security card] into the fire and dropped my driver’s license on top of it. A shock ran through me as I watched them curl and darken and burn.”).
A thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490523446
Page Count: 480
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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