An enjoyable slice of Americana, but lacks total emotional truth.
This engaging–if not compelling–memoir follows the life of an American girl from the Great Depression to 9/11.
Betts is a pleasant companion. Clear-eyed and insightful, she successfully brings the past to life, making it palpable and real. Her once well-to-do parents fell on hard times during the Great Depression and the family became vagabonds roving from one temporary home to another. But the author does not wallow in the low points or shy away from them. There was a lot of love in the family, but also many fights and much drunkenness, which Betts describes in unsparing detail. Her parents were alternately capable of turning a poverty-ridden Easter into something magical, and coming home drunk and vomiting all over the kitchen floor. The author accepts the good and the bad of her reality. She holds true to this trait even as she moves into adulthood, talking frankly about the ups and downs of being a wife and mother and of her lifelong struggles to balance her needs with those of her husband and children. In her handling of her husband, Bob, readers discover Betts’ soft spot as a memoirist. She is forthright in her assessment, portraying a man of considerable charm, intellect and cruelty. Bob was a functional alcoholic, and no one in the family was spared his occasional outbursts of violence. Aside from having the temperament of a spoiled child and erupting into tantrums over small infractions, Bob slapped his wife and once mercilessly beat his young daughter. At times, the author writes, Bob “derived a sort of fiendish joy from putting me down,” and he always stood in the way of her attempts to grow beyond the confining roles of wife and mother. For all her honesty, Betts fails to answer one big question–why did she love this ill-tempered, self-centered man?
An enjoyable slice of Americana, but lacks total emotional truth.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-4499-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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