by Henry I. Schvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016
A kind of nonfiction Portnoy’s Complaint but with a lot less sex; intricately renders a dysfunctional family’s life in the...
A professor describes growing up with his dysfunctional family in New York.
In this memoir, Schvey (Drama and Comparative Literature/Washington Univ.; Oskar Kokoschka, the Painter as Playwright, 1982, etc.) describes his troubled childhood. Born to parents from wealthy Jewish families, Schvey grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive father and a neurotic mother. A big shot at Merrill Lynch, Schvey’s father, Norman, beat him. He once slapped the 5-year-old boy in the face for not thanking a waiter. Norman also incessantly argued with and beat Schvey’s mother, an indifferent homemaker with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare. Cops frequently visited the family’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to break up fights, and Schvey and his younger brother sometimes discussed whether their father would kill their mother. After the inevitable divorce, Norman delayed alimony payments. Outside his home, the author found flawed and fleeting respite. A teacher at the Horace Mann School inspired his love of art and literature but was a pedophile. Schvey befriended a fellow counselor at a summer camp in upstate New York, but their earnest adolescent and mildly homoerotic relationship crumbled. At the University of Wisconsin, while riots over the Vietnam War disrupted Schvey’s education, he had his first affair with a graduate student instructor who turned out to be married. Schvey ultimately escaped New York by finding a sane Midwestern woman whom he married. After becoming a professor, he returned to New York to aid his dying but still abusive father and concluded the two would never reconcile. Keenly felt and elegantly written, this is a moving and sad account of a family that despite—or perhaps because of—all its power and wealth was profoundly troubled. Although Schvey shows contempt for his closest relatives, he paints balanced portraits of each of them. Their very humanness makes the book all the more tragic, touching, and affecting. Schvey’s sharp-edged humor—particularly when capturing the dialogue and mannerisms of his Jewish grandparents who tried to help —saves the author from wallowing in self-pity and gives a nice counterpoint to the “particularly virulent form” of illness called adolescence that he lived through and overcame.
A kind of nonfiction Portnoy’s Complaint but with a lot less sex; intricately renders a dysfunctional family’s life in the mid-20th century.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940442-16-7
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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