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NORTH OF ITHAKA

A JOURNEY HOME THROUGH A FAMILY’S EXTRAORDINARY PAST

A pleasant journey hardly rendered urgent by measured, unemphatic and unspectacular prose.

Shy, stilted debut by Eleni author Nicolas Gage’s daughter, who recounts her efforts in her mid-20s to rebuild the haunted family homestead in Greece.

People magazine beauty editor Gage was living the Greek-American dream in Manhattan when she decided to take up the gauntlet flung by her four thitsas (aunts) and return to the village of Lia, located on a mountain in the remote, impoverished province of Epiros. “There is hate in that village,” declared Thitsa Kanta, a long-time exile in Massachusetts who had nothing but bitter memories of the Greek/Albanian border town racked by a brutal succession of invaders during and after WWII. During the civil war of the late 1940s, Grandmother Eleni helped her entire family escape the Greek communist guerrillas who occupied the village; they joined her husband in America, but she herself was held back, arrested, tortured and executed. After 50 years of disuse, her house was decrepit and filled with evil memories. Nonetheless, young Eleni returned to supervise its reconstruction based on her father’s redesign. She was fluent enough in Greek to do business with the construction crew and make friends with neighbors, friends and sister churchgoers (she observed all the religious festivals). Most of her friends were elderly; they either burst into tears at her resemblance to her grandmother, or wondered why she wasn’t married. Her narrative is a curiously lackadaisical mixture of American earnestness and superficiality. She declares that she learned firsthand the importance of omens to Greeks, for example, from the discovery before her departure of ovarian cysts, which she monitored throughout her trip. When she finally forced herself to read her father’s unsettling account of her grandmother’s ordeal, she had to escape the scary parts by flipping through a Greek Vogue.

A pleasant journey hardly rendered urgent by measured, unemphatic and unspectacular prose.

Pub Date: May 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-312-34028-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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