Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.
Political activist Huber (Writing and Linguistics/Georgia Southern Univ.) combines original research, historical fiction and personal recollections in her attempt to connect with the anti-Nazi grandfather she never met.
Seeking an example of those who balanced activism, career and family as she struggled to do, the author traveled to the Ruhr region to study the life of her maternal grandfather—“Opa” in German—Heinrich (Heina) Buschmann Jr. Huber’s mother once called him a “nobody,” but he was in fact a tireless voice for the working class and a respected leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), a group caught between the extremes of Communism and Nazism. To discern this voice and “summon” her grandfather, Huber crafts fictional scenes from Heina’s life, interspersing them with passages about her own parallel experiences. Heina hands out leaflets for a parliamentary election; Huber protests the Iraq War. Heina considers leaving the party his father helped build when it supports rearmament; Huber devastates her immigrant mother by quitting college and joining an anarchist group. These echoes are occasionally forced, and the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing. In addition to inhabiting Heina’s thoughts, Huber sets herself a further challenge in striving to understand his brother, Jupp, who joined Hitler’s elite guard, the SS. The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication. Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent moral complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read.
Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.Pub Date: March 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1080-6
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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