A searing memoir and sharp social critique marred only slightly by the author’s excessive self-flagellation.
A professor turns to her family to offer a powerful memoir revolving around her younger cousin, who was murdered at the age of 29.
Allen (Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics/Harvard Univ.; Education and Equality, 2016, etc.) adored her cousin, Michael Alexander Allen, who possessed a winning personality and wide smile. Although he had the potential to succeed in school, Michael turned to petty crime at a young age and was convicted of a felony at 15. The author blames herself for failing to halt Michael’s wildness, and she condemns the criminal justice system for punishing Michael as an adult instead of a juvenile. Her critique of juvenile detention centers and adult prisons is convincing. Racial discrimination alone did not yield all of the injustices aimed at Michael, but they certainly contributed. When he won his freedom after 11 years in prison, he declared that he would become successful; the author believed him and offered him extraordinary help with a job search, rental housing, and college applications. However, she had no clue that Michael was leading a triple life: the “good” Michael was also deeply involved in crime and in a stormy relationship with a lover prone to violence. Allen details the circumstances of the murder and then offers flashbacks as she pieces together the circumstances of Michael’s life, foreshadowing its violent end. Much of the evidence offered through the flashbacks derives from Allen’s personal involvement in her extended family’s history. Some of the knowledge, however, comes from Allen’s decision to act as an investigative journalist, sharing what she learned from her aggressive reporting, no matter how unpleasant her findings. As the author chronicles her discoveries about how much Michael successfully hid from her, she is sometimes unduly hard on herself.
A searing memoir and sharp social critique marred only slightly by the author’s excessive self-flagellation.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-311-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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