Playwright (The Miracle Worker: Two For the Seesaw) William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead is primarily an offertory to his parents, a mother whom no one could touch for "brightness of heart or kitchen," a father always "alive and imperfect," remembered here not only to defy the finality of death but also to retain the continuity of their lives through his-through his children's. It is also an audit of his own growing up and growing away: from the small change of a childhood in the Bronx (marbles, soda pop, and a ten cent allowance) it proceeds to the currency of more universal values. Unabashedly emotional in spots, sometimes rather formless in technique, there are still remarkable scenes: of a grandmother (his mother's mother) who played the horses but never was seen without her of her little black arrings, who survived to bury a husband and fourteen sons: of his father and his long terminal illness when he became "so close to inhuman earth again": and particularly of his mother who scrubbed and cleaned her way through other people's houses as well as her own, fighting for the consanguinity of blood and love, and retaining an indomitable spirit until the end of her "72 years of workaday bones." There will be those who will not respond to the poetic and lyrical insets which follow the schemata of the Catholic mass, but the book, as a testament, as a testimonial, is unarguably affirmative and alive. Literary Guild selection and expected wide appeal.
Pub Date: March 25, 1968
ISBN: 0689705425
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
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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