A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.
A difficult father’s difficult final years, affectingly told by a son who, along the way, experiences just about the entire range of human emotion.
Cooper, a novelist, memoirist and essayist (The Year of Rhymes, 2001, not reviewed, etc.), begins with an account of an offer from a publisher to write the story of his father. But the younger Cooper finds the task impossible: His father—a retired Los Angeles divorce lawyer—does not like to talk and protects his emotional life with Cerberean tenacity. Years later comes this narrative, written after his father’s death in 2000. The tale is framed by two films. The first was one his father had showed him, an 8mm production about a so-called “miracle chicken” that lived without its head. The second is a video called To Hell and Back, produced by a Christian evangelist, that dramatizes the near-death experiences of five men who saw visions of Hell. This was a gift his father’s nurse, Betty, had given her patient as he neared death. (Nurse and father were also lovers.) She was a hard-core Christian; he, a casual Jew. In between are many other stories about dealing with Dad, about suffering through the deaths of three older brothers, about beginning his writing career. Cooper includes some scenes with his lover/therapist, Brian, who seems ever flawless and unvaryingly wise—a real-life counterpart to Robert B. Parker’s Susan Silverman, that cloying lover/therapist who threatens to vitiate each of the Spenser PI novels. Cooper amuses with accounts of trying to conceal from his father some passages he’d published about the man’s marital infidelities. And there are painful episodes—taking his father to doctors, enduring his sharp sarcasm, suffering through a three-year estrangement, receiving a $2 million bill from him for “paternal services.” And then the final shot to the solar-plexus, the epitaph his father had selected: You finally got me.
A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-4962-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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