A mostly well-written book for the author’s family and friends; others may take a pass.
An admiring portrait of the author’s father, who “rose from the lowest rungs of society, mastered the city, and became its King.”
Friedman’s (My Mother’s Side: A Journey to Dalmatia, 2011) title might lead readers to expect a story of a Chicago mayor or another of her great industrialists. However, the author’s father, Dan Friedman, was “a self-described ‘junk man’ whose business, the Associated Salvage Company, was located on the South Side…within a few blocks of the Union Stock Yards, the vast meatpacking district.” He was a man far ahead of his time who made his fortune recycling before it was fashionable. Raising his family on Chicago’s North Shore, he grew to be wildly successful, buying a new black Cadillac Coupe de Ville each year. The author writes of questioning his father’s history; he gained little from the man who never wished to discuss his childhood, insisting he didn’t know how to be a father since he never had one. Friedman also explores his grandfather Sam’s story of immigration and his father’s childhood in an orphanage and difficult upbringing. Like so many immigrants, they were distressed, but family was near, and both his father and grandfather entered mixed marriage with Catholics. Sam died suddenly when Dan was only 1; his wife, destitute, put her children in the Marks Nathan Home, a Jewish orphanage. Dan never forgave his mother for the years he spent there even though his siblings were with him. Memories of the harsh discipline and cruelty were never discussed. Would the possibility his grandfather died of syphilis explain why this woman received no help from her other family members, who all lived in Chicago? Ostensibly about his forebears, the slim narrative is really about the author’s struggles with his Jewishness, although he doesn’t really seem to care much until the end of the book.
A mostly well-written book for the author’s family and friends; others may take a pass.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63144-068-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Carrel/Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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