“It’s my task to transmit the legacy to a new generation of people the same age as those killed,” says Rose. He does just...
A transforming journey into a family’s past as a father takes his sons to Europe to follow in their relatives’ footsteps.
After his divorce, Rose (Flipping for It, not reviewed, etc.) decides to take 7-year-old Marshall and 12-year-old Alex, on a voyage of discovery into their father’s family’s circumstances during WWII. When they meet J.P., one of their relatives, he gives them a journal, runic but with enough information to follow. The three track J.P.’s movements as he fled with his family from the Nazis, town to town, hidey-hole to hidey-hole. On one level, this is an extended rumination on hiding places: “Even if they didn’t save our lives, they allowed us to reveal ourselves more fully than anywhere else. That was the wonderful paradox of hiding places. Not merely dark holes of concealment, they were also places of revelation.” But this is also a voyage of illumination, a reexperiencing in their own way of what J.P. and his family endured. It offers Rose as a father not only a chance to introduce his boys to a side of their family, but to address, often during bedtime chats, questions of love and hate and childhood, evil, forgiveness, and redemption, all sparked by visiting J.P.’s haunts along the trail. The boys come to know their relatives in wartime—“hiders in attics, hunted outcasts, pariahs and scaredy-cats and glorious eccentrics, caustic by nature and questioning by habit, and always on your toes.” Rose is blessed with a knack for character-sketching, for delineating the atmosphere of places, and for conveying drama: Their coming to an extermination camp in France, where J.P.’s two daughters were killed, is so powerful it’s crushing, a crash course in evil.
“It’s my task to transmit the legacy to a new generation of people the same age as those killed,” says Rose. He does just this, with tenderness and insight, retold here with extraordinary narrative skill.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-80915-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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