A piercing cry from the heart, a resounding call for reform — and that rare thing: a unique book. Wharton (Last Lovers, 1991, etc.) reports on events leading up to and away from the death of his daughter under horrific and, many will insist, unnecessary circumstances. On August 3, 1988, Kathleen Wharton Woodman was driving on Interstate 5 in Oregon with her husband, Bert, at the wheel and their daughters, Dayiel and Mia, strapped in their car seats. Suddenly the four were heading into billows of black smoke. Next minute they were dead, incinerated as the result of a highway pile-up. The smoke came from nearby fields where seed farmer Paul Thompkins was executing an annual activity, field burning. Wharton, immeasurably grieved and outraged, divides his account into three parts. The first, "Kate," is actually fiction, Wharton's idea of how his likeable, practical daughter might have told the story of her life. It's a simple life, full and uneventful in the way many lives are. In the second section, "Will," Wharton describes how he and his family handled their mourning, how they traveled to Oregon, where Will became convinced that field burning is not the only way to sanitize land. Mounting a campaign to fight the widespread practice, Wharton gathered what evidence he could, including pictures of the deceased that he had taken at the mortuary. "This first one is the one who burned the least, the little baby, Mia," the mortician says at the outset of the grisly, memorable scene. "Settlement," the book's third part, details how Wharton tried to force the kind of public trial that would expose the cruel arbitrariness of field burning. But authorities, including his own lawyers, pressed for a settlement to which he finally, frustratedly succumbed. Wharton's ordeal is not easy reading, but his persistence in assailing the woeful cause for it is highly admirable.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55704-223-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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