Poignant and raw; a commemoration of a family.
In this debut memoir, the only surviving member of a dysfunctional family explores the internal demons that plagued her loved ones.
“I’m the last person alive in my immediate family,” Bloom tells readers right up front. Before finishing the first page, the audience knows that both of the author’s brothers, Marshall and Alan, committed suicide. Her father was a thriving, functional alcoholic. And her mother, dutiful keeper of the hearth and social propriety, was often consumed either by sadness or rage. As the last in her line—the last to remember and be able to tell their story—Bloom looks back to gain greater understanding and acceptance of a nuclear family filled with dissension, miscommunication, and alienation. She begins by describing her grandparents. Her mother’s parents (Celia and Hyman Gershkovitz) and her dad’s father (Pizer Bloom) were Jewish Polish immigrants. Her paternal grandmother (Ida Bloom) was born in New York City but was the daughter of Jewish Polish immigrants. Both families wound up in Denver, where their respective offspring, Lillian Gershkovitz and Sam Bloom, met. The author’s parents wed in 1937, and she, their middle child and only daughter, was born in 1941. Turbulence at home and the social upheavals of the ’60s sent the siblings in different directions. Bloom’s articulate narrative follows a general chronological order but also moves back and forth in time as she examines her relationship with each family member. The account is peppered with some singular, intimate portraits of Denver’s mid-20th-century Orthodox Jewish community. Recalling a visit to her maternal grandparents, whom she called Zayda and Bubbie, Bloom writes: “Peering in the bathtub, I saw a large, live fish. Zayda had bought a carp so Bubbie could make gefilte fish for Pesach.” But these lighter episodes are the exception. Mostly, this is an exposure of the dynamics that left three adult offspring (all of them childless) feeling isolated and insecure. Of her own survival and success, Bloom concludes: “I...had the better luck and timing.” Family photographs reveal the happier moments.
Poignant and raw; a commemoration of a family.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72290-972-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fascinating and vital, if lopsided, record of an important conflict in British military history.
Intimidatingly researched, Kenney’s absorbing account of the Falklands War’s iconic Battle of Goose Green manages the weight of its subject with sobriety and pathos, if not consistent objectivity.
Twenty-five years after the Falklands War, Kenney’s meticulous rendering of this strategically pointless battle illuminates with minute detail the hows, wheres and whos, if not the whys, of a war that most historians agree should not have occurred. The author’s passion for the subject is palpable, and his factual legwork impressive. Gathering a broad array of sources, Kenney determinedly sets the stage for the central conflict between Thatcher-era Britain and junta-led Argentina. The account begins with past Falklands conflicts, trots out the major players and sheds light on the messy political obsessions leading up to the war. With as much detail as Kenney packs into the pages–in addition to seven chapters, the book contains five appendices, comprehensive chapter notes, a 12-page bibliography and an index–readers may expect the tone to favor data over author presence, but that’s not the case here. Kenney adulates Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Jones, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, as the emblematic British war hero, and General Leopoldo Galtieri, the military president of Argentina, draws the author’s full scorn, especially in a disdainful afterword. When the Battle of Goose Green and Darwin Hill arrives halfway through the narrative, Kenney renders British casualties with equal parts deep respect for heroism and clear frustration at its futility. By this point, it becomes evident that the hardscrabble soldiers of 2 Para–the “Toms,” here given voice through painstakingly footnoted source material–merit a greater share of the attention that the author distributes to Jones.
A fascinating and vital, if lopsided, record of an important conflict in British military history.Pub Date: April 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-9660717-1-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Part tabloid-style tearjerker, part sophisticated corporate exposÇ, by a former People magazine crime writer and bestselling author (The Strawberry Statement, 1969). On May 14, 1988, just outside Carrollton, Ky., a drunk-driving ne'er-do-well named Larry Mahoney slammed his Toyota pickup into a schoolbus carrying 63 children. The impact set the bus's fuel tank on fire. Twenty-seven died and 16 were hospitalized with burns. Only two families opted not to settle with Mahoney's insurers and the bus manufacturers. The Fairs, parents of Shannon, 14 when she died, and the Nunnallees, parents of Patty, who was 10, hired John P. Coale, Esq., the self-styled ``master of disaster'' who had represented the city of Bhopal in the Union Carbide gas leak. Coale charged the Ford Motor Company (and Sheller-Globe, which assembled the schoolbus for Ford) with ``consciously disregarding'' the danger they were creating by placing an unshielded fuel tank next to the front door of a bus that had ``flammable seats, inadequate emergency exits and a too-narrow aisle.'' Kunen's lingering account of the crash and its aftermath makes for excruciating reading, especially when he abandons taste for cheap effect. For example, describing a videotape of Shannon and her friends forming a cheerleader's pyramid, he writes: ``Was that pyramid, in that room, in that house, in that moment, on a sort of raft, borne on a river of time toward a bus crash waiting downstream?'' Kunen is on firmer ground when he describes, in meticulous detail, Ford's long history of subverting national safety standards in the name of cost- effectiveness. The book's strongest section focuses on Ford's tawdry behavior during the trial (arguing, among other things, that a schoolbus is a ``truck,'' not a ``bus,'' and therefore not subject to the safety standards of passenger vehicles). You'll want to avert your eyes as Kunen recreates the accident in all its blood and tears, but hang on for some impressive corporate muckraking. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-70533-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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