by Bunny Crumpacker and J.S. Picariello ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2011
A touching joint memoir by a birth mother and her adopted daughter about their lives apart and the close bond they shared until Crumpacker's recent death.
Copywriter Picariello writes about how she succeeded in tracking down her birth mother in 1996 after a two-year search. As early as she can remember, she knew she had been “chosen” by her adoptive parents, and she was told how her birth parents had married during the Korean War after knowing each other for only one month and separated shortly thereafter. Her birth mother couldn't manage alone and did what seemed best for the baby by finding her loving adoptive parents. Raised by a controlling mother, she was socially maladjusted—as a child she was a bookish loner, and as a teenager she experimented with drugs and sexual liberation. Married at 19 to a lawyer 10 years her senior, her life became more stable, although initially she felt overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood. Crumpacker (How to Slice an Onion: Cooking Basics and Beyond, 2009) describes her family background, in many ways similar to that of her daughter. Both of their mothers displaced their own insecurities onto their daughters. Crumpacker writes that her mother found her “different—and difficult. She felt it was her responsibility to mold me.” Her failed marriage, also at the age of 19, was an attempt to establish her independence from her mother. The circumstances of her marriage were more complicated than the story that Picariello was told, but essentially similar. She, too, had attempted to find her daughter—unsuccessfully. When they finally met, they found a startling affinity and were drawn to each other immediately. An absorbing story about adoption and much more.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4027-7570-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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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