A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.
James Brown’s daughter recounts her conflicted relationship with the “Godfather of Soul.”
Writing with Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival, 2008, etc.), Yamma Brown recalls what it was like to grow up in the shadow of one of the most famous and influential entertainers of all time, James Brown (1933-2006). The author begins at the end by recounting her father’s death and subsequent funeral in 2006, which was held at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with the sort of ostentation and pomp that one would expect from James Brown, even in death. From there, she begins to reconstruct an ambivalent portrait of her father’s life, from his time as a youngster shining shoes in small-town Georgia to his eventual position of power in the entertainment industry and all the trappings of fame and celebrity. But in a somewhat jarring transition, the book goes from rosy recollections of riding ponies on the family ranch to the chapter ominously entitled “Dad’s Beating Mom Again.” Suddenly, the memoir takes a seriously dark turn and never looks back. The young author went about the traumatic business of trying to come to terms with domestic violence from a tender age, watching her father physically abuse two unfortunate wives. But even more depressing is the author’s own near-fatal dealings with physical abuse from her own husband, coming about almost as if it were an inherited trait from her battered mother. In fact, the author’s story of life with her conniving, violent, near-psychopath of a husband begins to overtake the story of her relationship with her father. Unfortunately, it took a near-fatal beating from her lowlife husband before she finally scraped up the courage to leave victimhood behind.
A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-883052-85-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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