Nguyen’s not in the class of, say, Richard Rodriguez; nonetheless, this debut suggests she’s a writer to watch.
A childhood immigration memoir for foodies.
Nguyen’s father fled Vietnam with his two daughters when Nguyen was just a baby. Sponsored by a family in Grand Rapids, Mich., the Nguyens began to adjust to life in a “pale city,” dominated by conservative Christians and blonde Republicans. Nguyen explores her relationship with her new home through food: As a girl, she longed for and fantasized about the packaged goods that fill American grocery stores. One of her earliest discoveries was Pringles—the red tube in which the chips sit snuggly—which captivated her. When, as a girl, Nguyen began to read the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she marveled at the descriptions of butchering hogs and making cheese, activities that seemed to encapsulate the American frontier experience. She contrasts her own stepmother, Rosa, with the mothers of her school chums: Real mothers cook things like pot roast; real mothers bake Toll House cookies in the afternoon; real mothers send their daughters to school with lunches packed neatly in Tupperware containers. Rosa, a hard-working schoolteacher, was too busy to be Betty Crocker, and the family usually dined on simple Vietnamese food, often cooked by Nguyen’s grandmother. Nguyen finally went on strike, refusing to eat until her grandmother and stepmother agreed to “better” food. This gastronomic theme sometimes feels forced, but some of the author’s prose is lovely and her imagery fresh. And in her recreation of a world populated by Family Ties, Ritz crackers and Judy Blume books, she has captured the 1980s with perfection.
Nguyen’s not in the class of, say, Richard Rodriguez; nonetheless, this debut suggests she’s a writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03832-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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