A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga.
A missionary’s daughter recounts her childhood experiences in Haiti.
Debut author Irving, a past contributor to This American Life, was 6 years old when her family first moved from Oregon to Haiti in the early 1980s. Together with her parents and two younger sisters, they spent much of the next decade striving to improve the living conditions of a region experiencing unrelenting social upheaval and drought. The family was led by the fierce determination of their agronomist father. “My father’s vision for utopia,” writes the author, “was agrarian: trees on every hillside, vegetables in every garden, water in every dry streambed. Seeds were small, but they could change the world.” As the narrative progresses, the focal point becomes the author’s conflicting relationship with her father and how it related to his idealistic vision for the country and his family. Irving draws from their various journals, each offering a distinct slant on her experiences of that time and place. She reveals how her parents’ moral and religious zeal intersected and at times clashed with the harsh realities they faced each day in an uncompromising setting. “If, like my father, you suffer from a savior complex,” writes the author, “Haiti is a bleak assignment, but if you are able to enter it unguarded, shielded only by curiosity, you will find the sorrows entangled with a defiant joy.” In the lengthy final section, Irving tracks some of the changes in the region from her vantage point as a young woman returning after a 10-year absence. Later, she would assess further hardships in the capacity of a journalist assigned to cover the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Throughout the book, Irving reveals a journalist’s seasoned eye for nuanced regional detail, but her personal journey is surprisingly uninvolving and frequently bogged down by self-consciousness. A tighter edit, including a significant page-count reduction, may have resulted in a more authentically compelling story.
A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9045-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
