A pointillist accumulation of moments that movingly invokes speculation, introspection, loss and its habitual companion,...
Fiction writer Gordon (Pearl, 2005, etc.) grapples with the legacy of her complex, troubled mother.
It’s a companion piece to the author’s 1996 memoir of her father, The Shadow Man. Like that earlier book, this is an impressionistic portrait. “I came to realize that I couldn’t see my mother properly by standing in one place,” writes Gordon, explaining her title. “I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points.” She opens and closes this journey with vignettes about painter Pierre Bonnard. In 2002, shortly before her mother’s death, Gordon traveled to Washington, D.C., to see a Bonnard exhibition, escaping from the grim reality of a parent so deep in dementia she had not recognized her daughter for at least five years. In between those two points, the author’s mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, worked for decades as a legal secretary, not retiring until she was 75. She had uneasy relationships with her four sisters (one of whom the author despised) and a strange union with a man who couldn’t seem to lift off the launch pad: “They should never have married,” Gordon declares bluntly. Anna vacationed frequently with two close female friends and later took a few awkward trips to Europe with her daughter; at the Vatican, Mom met the Pope and said he smelled like raisins. She was a practicing, hopeful Roman Catholic who idolized several priests. At times, the author is brutal with herself. She wishes she had visited Anna more often during the final years in a nursing home; she regrets slapping her mother after a contretemps in Ireland. But when the nursing home called to say Anna had died, her daughter screamed.
A pointillist accumulation of moments that movingly invokes speculation, introspection, loss and its habitual companion, regret.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42456-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
