A moving reminder of the power of the human will.
A touching first-person account of a doughty political activist who walked from California to Washington, D.C., to promote campaign-finance reform.
Haddock (or “Granny D,” as she came to be known) is a tough old Yankee who seems to have stepped straight out of a Reader’s Digest “Most Unforgettable Character” article. She was just a few days shy of her 89th birthday when she began her cross-country hike on January 2, 1999. With help from Common Cause (coauthor Burke is director of Arizona Common Cause), relatives, friends, and a growing number of supporters, she trekked across the western deserts, the plains of Texas, the hills of Arkansas and West Virginia, and eventually through the streets of the nation’s capital to call attention to the issue. Except for 100 miles along the C&O Canal towpath (which she covered on cross-country skis), Haddock walked the entire way. At the rate of ten miles a day (with frequent stops to meet people, make speeches, and give interviews), her journey lasted 14 months. Much of this narrative is taken from her journal, to which she devoted two hours every evening, and most of it deals with events of the walk itself. The self-portrait that emerges makes clear that the author’s late-in-life public venture was not some sudden whim but an act grounded in a lifetime of intelligent concern, forthrightness, and involvement. Haddock includes excerpts from encouraging letters and e-mail messages she received from people following her progress, as well as highlights from some of her speeches (longer excerpts are in an appendix). Whether her efforts succeed in bringing about campaign finance reform remains to be seen, but politicians should be put on notice: this media-savvy old lady is now back in Dublin, New Hampshire, getting in shape for more walks.
A moving reminder of the power of the human will.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50539-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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