A heartfelt recollection constructed on a solid foundation of facts, though the absence of a through line will disappoint...
A Stanford historian’s posthumous memoir recalls his childhood among the peasant communities of his ancestral home in Borah, Yugoslavia.
Vucinich is nothing if not thorough in his descriptions of the people and places that made up his childhood home. From his arrival in the village by horse-drawn cart in 1920 to his departure in an automobile in 1929, there is no matter of daily life too small to be described in vivid detail. People slept on the floors under goat-hair blankets. Women hauled water from a cistern using a barrel, or burilo. All the older men in the village were given colorful nicknames derived from their personality quirks. Enormous stone hearths sat at the physical and emotional center of every home, until the Communists came to power after World War II, and everyone was required to replace their hearths with stoves and chimneys. Wives walked two or three steps behind their husbands. Cheese makers in the extended clan were so revered that they were given the most comfortable riding saddles when they traveled by horse. Schoolchildren became shepherds each summer, driving flocks of goats into the verdant mountains, counting and milking the livestock every day, processing the milk into cheese. Christmas celebrations were marked by the ritual arrival of the polaznik, the first person to visit on Christmas day. And so it goes. It’s not that Vucinich’s observations are uninteresting–there are, in fact, many engrossing, enjoyable moments–but with no story to hold all the disparate recollections together, and provide the reader some forward momentum, it becomes difficult to stay engaged.
A heartfelt recollection constructed on a solid foundation of facts, though the absence of a through line will disappoint general readers.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-930664-27-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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