by Frances Stroh ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2016
A sorrowful, eye-opening examination of familial dysfunction.
Detroit’s decadeslong public death spiral mirrors the steady dissolution of one of the city’s most prominent clans: the Stroh family of brewers.
Stroh, the golden-haired scion of the once-mighty Midwestern beer kings, remembers growing up under the shadow of material wealth and familial conspicuousness. Uneasy with both the brood and the money, the author sensed early on that not everything was as it seemed to be inside their tony enclave of Grosse Pointe: not the family’s beer empire that, for a time, kept the money coming in and certainly not the alcoholic father who appeared more enamored with his vintage collection of guitars and guns than his children. “Once he’d come into my room while I was writing a paper and had slapped me across the face for no apparent reason,” writes the author. “Later, he’d come back in, crying and apologizing. He was just drunk, he said.” The anxiety that Eric Stroh, frustrated photographer and reluctant beer baron—along with an equally disconnected mother—instilled in the Stroh children portends disaster as assuredly as the decades of economic malfeasance that led to Detroit’s fall. Frances, who still managed to distinguish herself as a Fulbright scholar, writes candidly and insightfully about the growing solicitude that grew inside her throughout her life. The assortment of family portraits displaying the dichotomy of smiling faces and secret hurts echoes that suffering in haunting fashion; her brother’s tragic trajectory is particularly disquieting and sad. “I was finding that gaining perspective on false constructs was a far simpler feat in art than in life itself,” writes Stroh. “In life, the false constructs themselves tended to take over.” In the family’s comfortable world, the outward appearance of abundance only masked the unsettling truth that unconditional love, much like money, sometimes comes in limited supply. The author’s family might have successfully burned through a massive fortune, but they squandered a lot more than that.
A sorrowful, eye-opening examination of familial dysfunction.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239315-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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