A delectable, well-crafted memoir.
Salon.com senior editor Moses (Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, 2003, etc.) shares an emotive life framed by sugary sweets.
The author grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1960s, and her mercurial, struggling-artist mother co-dependently bonded amid a male-dominated household. A “compliant, tidy daughter,” Moses recalls sugar being the “mainstay of my diet as a child,” which only amplified her “cake obsession” as an adult. The author recalls fond memories of her San Franciscan relatives, especially her “parsimonious old coot” of a grandfather who demonstrated an uncanny knack for fudge-making and trolling the dump for discarded treasures. Her confident mother subsisted within a “fairly constant thrum of creative emergency,” demonstrated in the crafting of spectacular birthday cakes for her children like three-dimensional bunnies and an elaborate gingerbread Noah's Ark. Though Moses believed her parents to be “disastrously mismatched,” they managed to keep the family unified throughout frequent relocations to various East Coast locales to accommodate her father's job, as well as a move from Virginia to Alaska in 1974 that created significant riffs in her parent's marriage. In the years that followed, the author found contentment in random boyfriends, her college days back in California, a prized editorial job at North Point Press in Berkeley, where she befriended authors like M.F.K. Fisher and Kay Boyle, and in creating a family of her own. Deliberate, sensitive and meticulous, the narrative brims with dense, curiously exacting detail, and each chapter closes with a tempting, uncomplicated recipe.
A delectable, well-crafted memoir.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34298-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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