by Caroline Clarke ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2014
A captivating memoir about a daughter’s reunion with her birth mother and the intricate consequences it had on both their...
Journalist Clarke’s story of her discovery that her biological mother was Carol “Cookie” Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole, a revelation that caused her to build a life-altering relationship with her through the exchange of letters, phone calls and postcards.
The author is an award-winning journalist and the happy mother of two. She is also the adopted daughter of two parents who gave her a wonderful life. When she visited the agency that handled her adoption, she only sought information on her genetic heritage, which she required for medical reasons. The details she received from the agency, however, as well as a series of remarkable coincidences, helped her realize that her birth mother was Cookie Cole, the daughter of the legendary musician. The author’s discovery forced her to acknowledge a deep-rooted curiosity she had about her birth mother since childhood. “All adoptees are curious about their beginnings,” she writes. “Anyone who claims otherwise (as I have many times) is lying.” So she reached out to Cookie in search of answers to the questions she had convinced herself, up until that point, that she could ignore. Clarke’s prose is elegant, crisp and deeply personal, and her narration is gripping, even after she reconnects with her biological mother and uncovers the truth about her own origins. Happy endings in life are seldom conclusions, and that Clarke gets one only complicated her story more. “Whose life is this anyway?” writes Cookie in one of her letters to her daughter, a fraught question coming from a woman who created life, only to have life force her to give her child away. Clarke effectively explores her crisis of identity by peeling back layer after layer of a complex, riveting personal history.
A captivating memoir about a daughter’s reunion with her birth mother and the intricate consequences it had on both their lives.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-210317-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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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