The richness of Masumoto’s earlier memoir (Epitaph for a Peach, 1995) about life as a Japanese-American farmer in California is generally lacking here. The problem: Masumoto never quite settles on a subject or direction. Instead, the narrator ventures all over the place, ranging from a discourse on raisins to an evocation of the community “hall,” and from his “chairmanship” of a neighbor’s funeral to the joys of sweating. Some of it’s interesting; the writing is often quite good, even if disconnected or chronologically challenging. Located in Del Rey in California’s Central Valley, the author’s 80-acre farm—20 acres for peaches, 60 for grapes—was purchased by his father rather inexpensively because fully a fourth of it was considered worthless. Covered in “hardpan,” a layer of clay and minerals hardened into rock, the property was cleared over a period of years, “and now lush green vines grow,” producing as much as two tons of raisins per acre. As Masumoto prunes his grapevines, he thinks of his jiichan, his grandfather Masumoto, who arrived in California 100 years ago to work in a vineyard, though he’d never seen a grape. The author traveled to Japan after his college days at Berkeley to study and work with distant relatives, most of whom scarcely knew his family. Then he resumed working with his father on the farm, enjoying the daily grind. As in his first book, Masumoto writes wonderfully of his crops and the challenges of keeping a small farm going. If it had been presented as a collection of vignettes or essays, this might have summoned up more literary or personal energy. But ill-arranged slices of life do not a memoir make. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04673-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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