Poignant, creative, and unique.
A Man Booker International Prize–winning translator’s photo-illustrated memoir about how growing up meant growing away from the younger sister she loved.
Changing “names, identifying details, and places,” Croft tells the story of two sisters, Amy and Zoe, that draws on events from her own life. Elder sister Amy was in second grade when Zoe had the first of several seizures. Doctors concluded the episode stemmed from a mild concussion, but after another, more violent episode, scans revealed a tumor in Zoe’s brain. The girls’ parents home-schooled both girls, who developed a rivalry over Olympic ice skaters: Amy favored those from Russia and Zoe those from the Ukraine. When their father hired a Ukrainian-born tutor named Sasha to teach them the language of each girl’s respective favorite country, the girls suddenly found themselves vying for his attention. But as Amy uncovered her linguistic gifts, she also found herself falling in love with Sasha, who later killed himself. She began college shortly afterward at age 15, where she indulged her passion for both languages and photography. In the meantime, Zoe, now homebound, was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. Consumed by guilt for the misfortunes of both her sister and Sasha, Amy fixated on and then attempted suicide. After she graduated at 18, she left Oklahoma for Berlin, hoping to leave behind her troubled home and become “a whole new person.” Her travels, which she recorded in idiosyncratic photographs, took her all over Europe, where she experienced the epiphany at the heart of this book. Despite the apparent ease with which she moved between countries and languages, Amy’s truest desire was to “fix forever the presence of her sister [and] never let her go” in every photo she shot. Haunting and visually poetic, Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.
Poignant, creative, and unique.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-94-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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