A thoughtful, poignant, and candid memoir perfect for Conroy fans.
An educational consultant and writer recalls his friendship with the late novelist.
Schein (Famous All Over Town, 2014, etc.) first met Pat Conroy (1945-2016) in early 1961 when both were students in Beaufort, South Carolina. Schein was a self-professed cheater who hated school while Conroy was the social and athletic star everyone adored. Yet both were also outsiders. Though a South Carolina native, Schein was a Jew in a majority Christian South, and Conroy was a “military brat” who, until arriving in Beaufort, had moved every year he had been in school. The pair bonded in high school and then deepened their attachment after college when they returned to Beaufort “to dodge the draft and to teach, in that order.” They soon discovered that their anti-racist beliefs and civil rights activism put them at odds with the conservative white power structure in Beaufort, including the board of education. In 1970, the year Schein went to graduate school at Harvard, Conroy lost his job as a teacher at an all-black school for daring to change a curriculum that emphasized obedience to authority rather than learning. While Schein continued his professional pursuits in education, Conroy left teaching to write. His autobiographical first novel, The Great Santini (1976), about the relationship between a son and his abusive military father, made Conroy a household name. But fame and the repressed rage he harbored against his father transformed the mild-mannered Conroy into an alcoholic “word-sniper” and “verbal hitman” who took cruel shots at everyone, including Schein. In 1990, Schein refused to publish a story in a school magazine by Conroy’s stepdaughter that discussed the sexual abuse she had endured from her birth father. Their friendship ended, but the two continued to talk “about each other all the time.” The men reconciled 15 years later and remained close until Conroy died. Honest in its portrayal of both Conroy and Schein’s own conflicted feelings toward the novelist, the lucid narrative deftly explores the complexities of a lifelong friendship.
A thoughtful, poignant, and candid memoir perfect for Conroy fans.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-13-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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