Daffy yet sweet and affecting.
Journalist Robinson cheerfully recalls growing up with a closeted gerbil-breeder.
The author’s father was a captain in the Navy, a war veteran and an academy professor. He also raised gerbils, as a hedge against future income needs and because he believed, as lab animals, they contributed to the common good. Because Navy officials would have frowned upon this strange sideline business, he had to keep it a secret until retirement, when his initial stash of eight “tiny, caffeinated kangaroos” reached a rotating population of nearly 9,000. Robinson presents a colorful cast of characters: her dad the “Gerbil Czar,” her acid-tongued mother, the standard-issue feckless younger brother, a cute but mischievous little sister and a too-smart-for-his-own-good youngest brother. It’s a scenario that could have been lifted from a 1960s sitcom, but Robinson invests the narrative with pathos, good-natured moments of absurdity and plenty of keen humor. The author also turns lyrical at times, such as when her mother bought Chinese golden pheasants, who were “pleasing to have around, like plumes of sunlight beneath the hedges.” As the captain’s gerbil empire evolved, so did the family. Her mother became more caustic, the author matured into a young woman and her brother rebelled against another gerbil-related task, prompting a chase around the farmhouse by his father as the family watched from the porch, lemonade in hand. Whether it’s Dad sawing wood in his Speedo—the author’s mother cautioned that he looked “like a French Canadian tourist”—or the many words of barbed wisdom from Mom, these recollections are entertaining and instructive.
Daffy yet sweet and affecting.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-33745-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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