by Brittany Ackerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2018
A brief but poignant memoir.
A nonfiction writer and teacher’s debut memoir about a loving but fraught relationship with her brother and the addiction to drugs they both shared.
Ackerman’s early childhood in New York was mostly happy, marred only by the occasional envy she felt for her older brother Skyler’s elaborate Lego constructions. “Life is so comfortable,” she writes about that time, “so nice, so perfectly placed out in front of us.” But beneath the facade of comfortable routine, cracks began to appear that Ackerman could not understand. One morning, her mother suddenly threatened to drive the car into the Hudson River. Sometimes her parents fought or behaved in ways that seemed cruel, and occasionally, her mother pushed her unwilling brother to do things like skate across the ice too fast in skates too big for his feet because she wanted her son to “earn accomplishments” and “be the best.” Worse still, her brother seemed to be growing up faster than she was, leaving her to feel that she was trapped in perpetual childhood. The author’s consolation was that Skyler would be there to save her, just as the perpetual motion machine he had created for a science class would save humanity when the world “stop[ped] spinning.” After the family moved to Florida, her and her brother’s lives took a turn for the worse. Skyler, “the ‘A’ student...[and] next big deal,” began to experiment with alcohol and then drugs. Following suit, Ackerman began dealing marijuana when she entered her teens and then later became a junkie who got high on everything from MDMA to oxycodone. But where her brother sank into a suicidal depression that took over his life, the author gradually found her way back to a fragile sobriety. Told in simple, spare language, Ackerman’s story is powerful not only for the story it tells, but also for the eloquent silences and chronological ruptures that symbolize the painfully fractured nature of her life and that of her brother.
A brief but poignant memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59709-691-1
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.