An affecting, tragicomic account of growing up poor.
A funny and touching memoir about an impoverished girlhood.
Poverty is never glamorous, as DeKam makes clear in her debut, but it’s sometimes possible to escape from its stranglehold. Born in 1972, DeKam was the third daughter of parents who vacillated between charming incompetence and abusive neglect. Her mother, Colleen, was a faded Irish beauty–turned–“champion complainer” prone to welfare fraud. Her father, Fred, was a dreamer, schemer and restless wanderer who dragged his family from New York to California and everywhere in between and then abandoned them for months. Fred was charming yet distant, and DeKam adapted quickly to his unreliability. Her mother didn’t learn the same lesson, and she stuck with her alcoholic husband, even when he stranded her in a tiny Wisconsin town with no job opportunities. While Colleen seemed incapable of taking charge of her own life, her daughters learned the power of independence, and each eventually broke free of their dysfunctional heritage. In a genre crowded with tales of difficult childhoods, DeKam’s plainspoken memoir stands out. Her voice is honest, and she doesn’t wallow in self-pity or give in to bitterness, even when recounting trying circumstances—the house in upstate New York that lacked indoor plumbing, the cockroach-infested studio apartment she shared with her parents in Arizona. In the most affecting passages, Meier describes the shame and anxiety that come with growing up poor. In one memorable scene, she visited a grocery store with a friend and had to use the family’s food stamps for the purchase. Her “anguish about how to pay” is palpable, as is her relief when the friend tactfully ignored the situation. While much of the book is laugh-out-loud funny, there are also darker moments, such as when Meier’s oldest sister permanently left home after discovering that her mother had opened credit accounts in her name. Meier’s inevitable breaking point comes years later, when she realized that her “feckless, lawless, and dysfunctional parents gave me that self-reliance” she needed to make her own way in the world.
An affecting, tragicomic account of growing up poor.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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