A lyrically heartfelt memoir of resilience in the face of significant obstacles.
A young essayist’s memoir of her extraordinary riches-to-rags childhood in the Philippines.
Barnes was not yet 3 when her family moved into the Mansion Royale, “a stately home in a post-Spanish, post-American, and newly post-Marcos democracy.” Bought with her mother’s inherited wealth and her international businessman father’s hard-won gains, the house represented everything “glitter, gold, and glam.” But cracks soon began to appear in the family’s fairy-tale life. The author’s beautiful mother lost a baby and became subject to mood swings and violent fits of rage, and a “war between Uncle Sam and Saddam Hussein” in the Middle East caused her father’s business to founder. Desperate to shore up their finances, her parents used the last of their capital to transform the mansion into an events pavilion they rented out to film companies and wealthy families. Then an epic monsoon flooded the home and ruined it. Barnes’ father left the Philippines to rebuild his business while her increasingly unstable mother soon took up with a social climber named Norman, who beat her and used the mansion as a site for cockfighting and prostitution. Forced to fend for themselves, Barnes and her brother, Paolo, ran a student taxi to bring in food money only to have their mother force them to turn over the business to her lover. Meanwhile, Norman became involved with a guerrilla group in a failed attempt to build a political name for himself while the author’s mother continued to support him. Eventually rescued from the mansion by Paolo, Barnes went to live with a stepsister, and, at 12 years old, she finally found “mercy in the mundane” life that had eluded her. In this tender and eloquent tale, the author plumbs the depths of family dysfunction while telling a harrowing story of survival graced by moments of unexpected magic.
A lyrically heartfelt memoir of resilience in the face of significant obstacles.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4613-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.
From African-American economist and author Sowell, a forthright memoir of growing up the hard way in Harlem—without a father, but with an admirable refusal to compromise one’s principles.
As a grown man, Sowell can now discern helpful guideposts (that would later determine his success) in what was an often frightening and uncertain childhood. He is grateful that he left the South too young to be subjected to its pervasive racism, that he was in public school when its education was still excellent, and that he became a professor before affirmative action called into question many black accomplishments. Born in 1929 in North Carolina, he never knew his own father and was adopted soon after his birth by an aunt. He left the South after an idyllic childhood and moved to Harlem with his mother and two older sisters in 1939. There he entered the local public school, and was soon an outstanding, as well as an outspoken, student. The family was proud of his accomplishments, but when he was accepted at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, they objected to the hours he spent studying instead of earning money, and he had to drop out. Drafted into the Marines during the Korean War, he took advantage of the GI bill to finish high school, as well as attend college, graduating from Harvard. The following years—spent teaching at colleges like Cornell or working in Washington while he finished his dissertation—were often rocky. And he describes his run-ins with obstructive bureaucrats, careerist academics, and bigoted racists, encounters sometimes exacerbated by his often-unpopular political opinions. Though Sowell writes movingly of his son who was a late talker, this is not a personal memoir, but rather an account of a philosophical and professional evolution shaped by a lifetime of challenging experiences.
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86464-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A slim, somber classic.
Didion (We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, 2006, etc.) delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter’s death and her inevitable own.
In her 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana’s childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. “I put the word ‘diagnosis’ in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ ” she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom. Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
A slim, somber classic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26767-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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