It didn’t come cheap, but Fuchs has achieved a beautiful balance of humor and tragedy—all wrung from the same mess of real...
Wry account of a once-alienated daughter who becomes ever more entwined with her mother as the older woman makes a memorable decline.
Fuchs’s mother Lillian was always a force to be reckoned with. Born in 1908, she was the favored, blue-eyed daughter of a Jewish immigrant in the hat trade. She got into Radcliffe in the age of quotas, dropped out and married, then bucked convention again to become a divorced single mother who ran her own business. Seductive, a snappy dresser, and an unabashed narcissist, Lillian makes for a meaty protagonist. Fuchs herself seems perennially surprised by this woman who happens to be her mother; by turns, she’s bemused, frustrated, hysterical, terrified, angry, and entertained. Her memories of childhood are far from warm and cozy, but since she’s done just fine for herself by the standard measures of family and career, the discomfort of watching young Elinor left behind with her grandmother as her mother surges ever forward in her career is tempered by the knowledge that Fuchs is now a professor at Yale with two daughters and a life partner. In any case, there’s little room for pity or censure as the reader is carried along by a great story. Lillian, an adamantly independent woman all her life, finally needs to be taken care of. She’s mostly lost her mind, and although she’ll never really know it, she needs her daughter. Fuchs combines her account of the weirdness of caring for a physically competent, mentally absent woman with episodes from their shared past. Her brisk prose effectively captures Lillian’s energy, the oddities of communication that Alzheimer’s imposes, the endless grind of arranging and placating caregivers, and her own emotional landscape when she finds herself trapped in a state of emergency that lasts a decade.
It didn’t come cheap, but Fuchs has achieved a beautiful balance of humor and tragedy—all wrung from the same mess of real life.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6317-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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