Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.
A peripatetic childhood is marked by resentment and loneliness.
Because her father worked for a petroleum company, Wallen (Moon Pies and Movie Stars, 2006) moved with her family from Nevada to Nigeria, Peru, and Bolivia, each time suffering “giant, seismic shifts in cultures” that led to a fear of emotional attachments and inevitable loss. In her first nonfiction book, the author creates a candid but uneven rendering of her childhood experiences, probing family stories in an effort to discover reality. One experience, which mystifies Wallen, occurred in Peru, where she remembers that her family looted an ancient gravesite for artifacts, with which they decorated their home. Asking her parents, now in their 80s, for verification, her mother admits that they had been grave robbers but insists that she “had no idea” that what they were doing was illegal, if not immoral. “We were ghouls,” Wallen’s mother realizes now. “Hideous people.” But apart from that event, the family hardly seems ghoulish or hideous, although they were sometimes clueless about young Amy’s needs. Unfortunately, family members and friends come across as one-dimensional figures or, worse, stereotypes—e.g., the buxom, warmhearted African nanny, the diffident house steward. Wallen’s two older siblings, sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and her father, usually out in the field, are lightly sketched. Her mother, “nervous and harried,” emerges as brittle, impatient, and highly demanding. Wallen’s longing for her love is a recurring theme. “I had a talent for disappointing her,” she writes. The author sees unearthing a dead body as analogous to the perilous project of digging up shards of the past. “Every time you remember,” she writes, “you rewrite” and reimagine. “The more often you tell the memory, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened.” But her self-portrait undermines her project of discovering family history: as she tries to capture her childish perspective, she too often comes across as whiny rather than emotionally vulnerable.
Ghosts, skulls, and skeletons haunt a woman’s elusive memories.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9695-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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