A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism.
Chronicle of the chaotic year during which two-time Pushcart Prize–winning author Unferth (English/Wesleyan Univ.; Vacation, 2008, etc.) and her then-boyfriend went from being college coeds to aspiring communist revolutionaries in Central America.
The author recounts the highly unusual journey on which she embarked in 1987. With little more than $2,000 and a bottle of malaria pills, Unferth and her idealistic boyfriend George traversed Central America via buses, from Mexico down to Panama. They had hoped to join the Sandinistas and procure “revolution jobs,” but “it turned out that few people wanted to hire us and if they did, they almost immediately fired us.” Inspired by George, whose inability to deny anyone’s request for money left the couple in a perpetual state of poverty and hunger, Unferth converted from an “atheist Jew” to a “Calvinish-Marxist-Kierkegaardian Christian.” Among the many misadventures that ensued, highlights include stints at a dysfunctional Salvadoran orphanage and a nearby brothel, followed, months later, by their inadvertent participation in an enormous protest against Noriega’s military dictatorship in Panama. The chaste couple, who got engaged on the trip despite Unferth’s mounting doubts about their shared future, struggled with nagging money and visa issues, and were robbed repeatedly, including at knifepoint. After living on a paltry diet consisting mainly of bread, Unferth’s belly grew distended. She also suffered from dysentery, insects that burrowed beneath her skin and a slew of other health problems, all of which she describes in uncomfortably graphic detail. “Mostly,” she writes, “I did not have fun.” Fortunately, Unferth writes with a sly, understated appreciation for the absurd. Though the relationship didn't stick and the author returned to the Midwest, the memories of the trip inspired her earlier writing, subsequent trips to Nicaragua and a private detective–aided search for George.
A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9323-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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