Eschewing straightforward chronicle, Irish poet and novelist Healy (A Goat's Song, 1995), born in 1947, re-creates his upbringing through a series of impressionistic word-pictures and characterizationsmost poignantly of his father, a policeman who retired early due to ill health. Writes Healy, taking his bearings here, ``What happened is a wonder, though memory is always incomplete, like a map with places missing.'' The young boy felt trapped with his family's move from the small village of Finea to the town of Cavan, where they lived above the busy bakery-tearoom operated by his aunt Maisie and his mother, Winnie. He and his father were both sleepwalkers, seeking escape in night dreams (``most nights we set off for Finea''). Healy gives little description of how he grew to be a man in London, though he does allow a self-deprecating glimpse ahead to the writer who returns home to find himself fabricating, to the editor of the local paper, a literary success he's not yet achieved. Thematically and stylistically, Healy's talents are ever on display here; the occasional sustained heroic catalogue of Cavan, for examplethe author piling clause upon vivid clause, like so many layers of frostingproviding technical tours-de-force; though his later experience at Saint Patrick's Secondary College, rendered primarily through re-created diary entries, is far less memorable. In closing as he flash-forwards to the 1990s and his return to Cavan to care for his aged mother, infirm and losing her faculties, Healy evokes the surprising bawdiness of the old woman's humor and ruminates on an imaginary place, Hy Brazil, like another Atlantis rising out of the sea, out beyond where the author lives, in North Sligo. The island, he concludes, is, like life, ``peopled with uncertainties.'' With his descriptive talent and his knack for making comedy out of tragedy, Healy has written a beautiful, imaginative, full- blooded memoir.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100304-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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