Observant but often jumbled and in dire need of editing.
A memoir that chronicles the misadventures of a Jamaican-born “drifter.”
After first-time author Philip was born in Jamaica, his father wrapped him up in his jacket, took him outside before the dawn, and held him up to the heavens, praying that he would survive because his mother had lost at least five other babies. Philip has led an eventful life ever since, which he chronicles in his sometimes-entertaining, sometimes-bewildering memoir, styling himself as a “drifter” on a “spiritual journey.” “In this story I have put together a portfolio of my life experiences...to show how the drifter triumph [sic] over evil for good, with the hope that others may learn something from his experiences,” he writes. Philip’s meandering took him to England, back to Jamaica, to the Congo, and then back to England, spanning at least two marriages, extensive marijuana use, a spell as a musician, and even an arrest for rape that landed him in a Jamaican jail cell for six months. He was never convicted. In the “land of my birth my own people locked me up in a room full of human shits,” he laments. Some readers may find this tale to be, at the very least, self-indulgent, the stream of consciousness of a “ganja”-addled misfit who is incapable of maintaining a relationship with another human being. The book is also rife with malapropisms—for example, “she was showing me the autonomy of the woman’s body parts.” But Philip is cleareyed about the poverty of his homeland and the racism he encountered as a schoolboy in England, recalling that one teacher “felt like giving all of us blacks and Pakistani to cane but he is going to wait until the lesson is over.” And there is a picaresque flavor to the book—his life as a musician was “just sex Drugs and Rack an Roll and free food sometimes”—as Philip drifts from one misadventure to another.
Observant but often jumbled and in dire need of editing.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-9538-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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