A triumphant story of a woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother and an inspiring, though haunting, testament to...
In this debut memoir, a determined young woman comes of age in New York City following the death of her mother.
Donsky’s mother, Veronica, died giving birth to her younger brother, Eddie, but no one in the family told the author—not even her father. She “never hear[s] him say her name, never found a picture of her in the house.” Instead, she spent her adolescence believing that her mother was “missing,” until a cousin finally told her that she was dead. Her father remarried when her brother was still an infant, and he made the author swear to never tell Eddie that “Miss Marge” isn’t his real mother. The lie was a terrible burden on the author: “When a child is forbidden to say what he or she knows to be the truth…the heart is never free and easy.” As she grew older, she longed to go to college, but her father said that “no one needs college to get married and have a bunch of kids.” However, she was dead set on leaving Yonkers, so she took night classes at Fordham University and became a stewardess for Trans World Airlines. Eventually, she did marry, and while on a trip to visit her mother’s grave, she uncovered a terrible secret. Donsky’s struggle to understand her father is a familiar one, but watching their relationship deteriorate is heart-wrenching. It’s impossible not to root for the tough, sassy author as she builds her own life and finds closure in the aftermath of mother’s death. The memoir is fast-paced and absorbing and features some beautifully rendered reflections on her complicated relationship with her father: “He’s like the clouds racing by. I love watching them, even though I don’t know a thing about clouds.” The book’s climax, after a slow buildup, is shocking without resorting to melodrama. Overall, Donsky handles her family’s story gently, sidestepping sentimentality to reveal honest recollections of her girlhood.
A triumphant story of a woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother and an inspiring, though haunting, testament to the endurance of the human spirit.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-074-7
Page Count: 338
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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