Articulate, touching and hopeful.
Artful memoir about the angst and joys of growing up behind the Iron Curtain.
Gorokhova vividly evokes the bleak years of the latter half of the 20th century in Russia, when the Great Patriotic War was followed by the Cold War and food shortages were the norm. The author blends cultural history into her narrative of daily life in cold Leningrad. She recalls gathering mushrooms with her mother, a professor of anatomy, and her sister, an actress. She dreamed of fishing in the Gulf of Finland with her father, a loyal party functionary. A sympathetic uncle once wrapped a stolen kotlety, complete with mushroom sauce, in a newspaper for her. She learned to join the longest queue she saw because something worthwhile might be at its end. She absorbed the teachings of Checkhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin. She built friendships and nurtured adolescent crushes. Even though privacy was an unknown concept—there was no word in the Russian language for it—kissing, notes the author, was the same on either side of the cultural divide. Because of the author’s proficiency in the English language, including “the twelve tricky tenses,” she landed a job in the House of Friendship and Peace and also worked as a guide for foreign tourists. It was her language skills that facilitated emigration, and marriage provided the ticket to the unknown West. Now, years later, oligarchs have replaced apparatchiks, Leningrad is St. Petersburg again and Gorokhova is content in her new home. “In our private American space,” she writes, “we can splice the cleaved halves of our souls and heals; we can change if we want to—transform ourselves, as my actress sister knows how to do—and no one will say we’ve betrayed the collective. We can simply live, and keep the door open, and wait for whatever enters.”
Articulate, touching and hopeful.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2567-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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