by Bobby Burns ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 1998
paper 0-8165-1862-9 A Filofax view of 41 days in a homeless shelter. Burns is a college graduate and the editor of an NAACP newsletter, as well as assistant director of an alcohol-recovery program in Tucson, Ariz. It was in that city that he stepped off the bus with some money in his pocket and a history of medical, drug, and alcohol problems. The shelter where he checked in had more than 100 men packed into metal bunk beds in the sleeping area; the bathroom boasted of two urinals and two toilets (without doors), plus six showers and six sinks to serve all these clients. Distressed by the crowded conditions, the odors, and the mix of ill and addicted men, Burns, a navy veteran, nevertheless caught on quickly to the shelter’s routine: up at 5:30 a.m. to turn in laundry, breakfast at 6:00, a rush to the shelter bus for the trip downtown to apply for benefits, look for a job, see a counselor. Unless excepted for one reason or another, shelter residents had to be out of the building between 7:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. each weekday and back for dinner, unless the shelter was informed otherwise. This was the shape of Burns’s days for the next six weeks, as recorded in the journal he kept. He seems to have recorded complete menus of what was served for dinner, as well as detailed notes on his evenings in the shelter. He eavesdropped on intake interviews, read, fretted about contagious diseases, and did his share of clean-up. The schedule and structure helped him to stay sober, although others smoked, did drugs, and drank, sometimes tipping the fragile equilibrium among the residents. Later, on his own, Burns began to drink again, but recovered and moved on to a productive life. Burns is to be commended for hanging tough and pulling through, but these recollections contribute little more than a menu- by-menu tableau of life in a shelter.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-8165-1861-0
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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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