This memoir of a Dublin girlhood is well written but lacks immediacy. Novelist Crowley (The Ways of Women, 1993, etc.) matter-of- factly recounts her growing up in the slums of Dublin, from an inner-city tenement to a project house outside the center of the city. Hunger does not figureher father has a steady job as a hearse driver, but it is Crowley's mother's determination that provides for her family, as she sometimes visits the pawnbroker or the moneylender. It is hard not to draw comparisons between Crowley's Dublin and Frank McCourt's Limerick. Both authors recount 1930s childhoods in the slums of Irish cities under the specter of tuberculosis. As firstborn children, Crowley and McCourt were both expected early in adolescence to share in the responsibility for their family's support. McCourt's success, however, is hard to follow. Crowley's writing is adequate, but it is by no means as vivid as McCourt's. She keeps her readers at a distance, rather than involving them in the action. What does stand out in Crowley's narrative is her unwavering love for her father and, at least in childhood, her lack of compassion for her mother, who in typical Irish fashion is the backbone of her family. Her father's affair with a younger woman almost causes him to leave the family. However, the prevailing social code of the time is stunning: Crowley's mother reveals the affair to the young woman's aunt, thus putting a stop to her husband's plans. Her mother's forbearance of her husband's unfaithfulness and the beating he gives her upon learning she has thwarted his escape would appear saintly to any reader, but Crowley faults her mother for not being forgiving enough. Her father is doomed, though, and ends up with tuberculosis. A childhood affectingly told, though without sufficient intimacy.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1998
ISBN: 1-56947-112-6
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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