by Inga Clendinnen ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2001
A touching insight into how we build our sense of self.
A hypnotizing memoir exploring depths of severe illness, identity, and memory itself.
Clendinnen (Reading the Holocaust, 1999) provides a discursive account of her childhood in Geelong, Australia during WWII, of her parents, and of her current experience fighting against liver disease. The author, whose degenerative illness leaves her prone to hallucinations, first takes the reader on a meandering tour of ephemeral images past and present, including recollections of early-life impressions of animals, folk stories, and the raw sights and sounds of hospital respite. She takes into account the associations behind her train of thought. In one case, while in the hospital, she remembers a girlish fascination with a tiger at the zoo. “I too was in a cage with feeding times and washing times and bars at the sides of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod,” she writes. As her memories gain coherence, the reader is drawn into the story of Clendinnen’s parents, her childhood, and daily life in the town of Geelong. These are relayed not so much in narrative but in mood and feeling (“When my father was shaving it was warm fragrant, sun-yellow”). The author is at her most engaging when she struggles to shape an accurate picture from memories of her parents—a pursuit that acknowledges the frustration of the parent-child relationship. “We will be able to look directly at them only when death has lifted their shadow from us,” she bemoans. Clendinnen moves through her remembrances in a trancelike state, often making use of abstract metaphors (e.g., she describes herself during one period of convalescence as being “held together by shadow knitting”). The result is a powerful and vivid recollection, in the mire of self-absorption.
A touching insight into how we build our sense of self.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0600-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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