An incomplete yet intriguing account of one woman's daily victories and defeats as she works to keep a New England farm going during the Great Depression. This posthumous memoir by Robertson (190179) was discovered by her daughter. When Adele ``Kitty'' Crockett Robertson's father, a physician, died early in the 1930s, he left his Ipswich, Mass., farm encumbered with debt. Despite discouraging words from her family, the Radcliffe-educated Robertson, alone except for her Great Dane, worked the apple and peach orchards to keep the farm from foreclosure. In this unfinished memoir, Robertson occasionally looks to the past, as when she describes the time her father literally got a bee in his beekeeper's bonnet and was locked out of the house by her mother, who feared he'd bring the angry swarm in with him, or when a Civil War veteran recalled some tantalizing fragments of the farm's history. However, the account focuses mainly on Robertson's own struggles during the years 193234. She copes with a range of pestsfrom an arrogant banker to unscrupulous men who try to steal her apple trees' ``drops'' to destructive aphids and apple maggotsfacing each down with spirit. Despite her own precarious finances and her desire to drive a favorable bargain when selling her producea process she fears and dislikesRobertson refuses to exploit the desperation of the unemployed, paying well the few men she can hire, trusting them, and getting reliable workers in return. Persevering despite chemical burns and insect bites, working with equipment that has to be patched to run, she brings in a splendid 1932 harvest; but this was the Depression, and ``everyone had apples.'' The harsh winter freeze of the following year marks the real beginning of the end for the farm. Despite its fragmentary nature, and the only minimal supporting commentary supplied by the author's daughter, this enjoyable memoir opens another small but valuable window into our past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-4092-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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