by Bella Spewack ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1995
A vitriolic look back at a childhood of poverty by an Eastern European immigrant at the start of the 20th century. Before going on to co-write such Broadway hits as Kiss Me, Kate with her husband and collaborator, Sam Spewack, Bella Cohen (18991990) was a Jewish immigrant child living on New York's Lower East Side. Written when she was only 23 and never before published, Streets is a memoir of the abject poverty that gave her an overwhelming drive to escape and succeed in non-Jewish American society. Although the book reads like a dry internal monologue, what is clearly communicated is the young girl's absolute and overwhelming anger at her own poverty and surroundings. This bitterness overshadows any nuances the author tries to give to the sights, sounds, and smells that crowded the tenements in which she lived. In fact, her ability to emotionally distance herself from the details of her life is so pronounced that, upon returning home after a summer of working in a boys' camp, not only does she not recognize her own mother, whom she passes in the hallway, but she feels disgust at the woman's ragged, unkempt manner. The only emotional bond Spewack forms in her youth is with her baby half- brother, who dies in the last pages of the memoir; her solace is the local library. Although we learn in the afterword, written by an old friend, that Spewack subtitled the book ``Why I Wrote Comedy,'' it's unfortunate that the publisher chose not to retain that subtitle, because as the memoir stands, Spewack seems doomed to a life of rage and resentment, despite what the reader knows of her later accomplishments in life. A study in personal determination, but lacking the literary touches that allow us to see and experience a life. (10 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55861-115-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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