A shaggy but powerful work about a South Dakota family.
A writer examines her childhood in the rural Midwest in this debut memoir.
“If you ever come to these gently rolling hills in northeastern South Dakota,” writes Scoblic early in her book, “with the farmlands nestled near two clear lakes, decorated with the twisting of the Whetstone River, late May would be the time to make the trip.” In this land—beautiful and hard in different ways—the author began life as Barbara Hoffbeck, the seventh child of Roman Catholic farmers who had struggled through the Depression. Growing up in the 1940s, Scoblic experienced a childhood that was in some ways picturesque: picking the strawberries that grew on the family’s property and catching snapping turtles with one of her many brothers. But there were tragedies, too, as when the author’s oldest sister, who had no control “over her muscles” and lived in a crib, died when Scoblic was 7 years old. In addition, two of the author’s siblings were sent to live with her grandparents. Scoblic wanted more for herself than the difficult road of her parents, and she eventually went to college, served in the Peace Corps, and settled permanently in New York City. Yet the lives of her parents, siblings, and extended family were never far from her mind, and this volume of reminiscences charts not just the stories of her youth, but also the ways those things have shaped and weighed on her throughout her adulthood. The author’s prose is lyrical and highly observant, offering surprising, incidental details, as in this passage about sitting in church: “Through those narrow openings, scents of grass and wild clover filtered in, along with a few flies and box elder bugs. Those bugs gathered in great clusters on the sides of buildings every August. When viewed up close, they displayed an art deco design of slate gray and orange.” Featuring family photographs, the memoir is infused with a subtle melancholy, which is perhaps to be expected in a book about a place and people now gone. But in the folds of the digressions and anecdotes readers will find an unmistakable joy on the part of Scoblic: the joy of returning to a place, having left it. The joy of carrying it within her wherever she goes.
A shaggy but powerful work about a South Dakota family.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-531-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
