by Edgar Brown Judith A. Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2016
A warts-and-all Missouri family album with many side trips to conflicts in the Pacific and school-administration offices.
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Debut memoirist Brown writes of his Depression-era upbringing, his World War II experience in the Pacific, and the ups and downs of his later civilian existence in education.
Brown, an American veteran of the air war in the Pacific and, later, an educator and youth counselor, makes repeated references to newsman Tom Brokaw’s definition of “The Greatest Generation” as he reflects on his own life. He grew up in the 1930s in Depression-hit Sedalia, Missouri, as the son of a well-liked local businessman. As a child, he had only one store-bought toy (a small replica of a bank), but he says that he didn’t feel particularly deprived. A talented, wiry young athlete, he had to overeat and drink lots of fluids on short notice in order to meet the minimum weight requirements for shipping out after Pearl Harbor. He preferred piloting over the onerous routines of foot soldiers, and he flew harrowing missions in the Pacific in Patrol Bombing Squadron 33 and participated in the liberation of the Philippines. Following the war (and a welcome home with little fanfare) he taught music in hardscrabble Missouri, often working with kids with disabilities; he happily reports some success stories here. The political and generational unrest of the 1960s seemed to affect his own family, and Brown’s hasty wartime marriage ended in divorce, granted on the author’s birthday in 1974; he co-wrote this manuscript with his second wife, Judith. At times, this memoir appears to lean toward defensiveness, aiming barbs at the author’s ex-wife, his estranged adult children, and academic colleagues who fell short. Even so, Brown writes that he’s had a great and “blessed” life, despite career-crippling, late-onset hearing loss, possibly caused by his many hours near deafening aircraft engines during the war. Although many accounts of combat brag about superior technological innovations, Brown instead writes of “ordinary people doing an extraordinary job with outdated, obsolete equipment and with thin supply lines thousands of miles long.” For him, teamwork, cooperation, and his own Depression-tempered resolution and religious faith were key not only to military victories, but also to his own successful mentoring of troubled students. The “ivy” in the title is a metaphor: it refers not to elite East Coast universities but to the way that such vines support one another.
A warts-and-all Missouri family album with many side trips to conflicts in the Pacific and school-administration offices.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4809-2679-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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