An engaging tale of one woman’s personal development.
An emotional memoir of love and spirituality.
While on a trip in the Sierra Nevada in the 1940s, the author’s family stumbled across a group of fishermen angling an exceptionally large trout, and her father rented a cottage next to the lucky fisherman. This began the family’s annual pilgrimage to what they called “the ranch.” For Rossen, the younger of two sisters, the ranch inspired tranquility and communion with nature. It was a welcome change for the author, who throughout her life struggled with self-doubt and the feeling that she didn’t belong. She saw her mother and father as emotionally distant, and put her sister on a pedestal. When, during her teenage years, her family purchased the ranch, a deputy sheriff named Ed handed her a small bouquet, but she lacked the confidence to respond. Year after year, she and her father returned to work the ranch during fishing season, and her encounters with Ed continued. Even after the family sold the ranch, the adult author, with her husband and children, kept returning to vacation in the area, staying in cottages that Ed and his wife had built. By the time Ed and Rossen revealed their feelings for each other, they were both married—and conflicted about what to do next. Although Rossen focuses on the tension between her and Ed, she also provides a beautifully written account of a woman coming into her own. The book’s power comes from the author’s willingness to open up; she writes in first person, bringing the reader into her world, even when she experiences loss. She eventually develops the self-confidence she so needed earlier in life; for example, she’d long believed she was inferior to her sister, but found out later that her sister always thought that Rossen had the perfect life. Overall, the author’s innocence and honesty will help readers to root for her.
An engaging tale of one woman’s personal development.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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