A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.
Hickam’s 1950s West Virginian coal-town story (Rocket Boys, 1998) continues: a polished memoir of a roughhewn place seen through his eyes as a perceptive, questing teenager.
Not exactly Versailles to begin with, Coalwood slid into outright misery when Hickam was a boy. Once a benign company town—prosperous, safe, paternal—it was sold to a steel conglomerate not long after the miners formed a union. A kind of winter of the soul then descended upon Coalwood, which was now just another item on the ledger that had to show a profit. Suddenly, the miners had to buy their houses (or get out), forget about medical treatments, increase their production (with no expansion of manpower), and underwrite all town activities themselves. Of course, as the author explains, these had been the very ties that bound Coalwood together. For the first time, hunger came to town, and Hickam’s father, the mine superintendent, felt each new insult from the steel company as a blow to the solar plexus. Unlike the author’s earlier memoir, which centered on the rocket club he belonged to and mined the rocket metaphor as relentlessly as the town dug coal, this one is more diffuse. A number of strains play themselves out against the background malaise: the mother’s desire to flee Coalwood, the little cruelties of small-town life balanced by little acts of kindness, the gamble taken in reopening a jinxed shaft, and the author’s hurtful relationship with his father (a distant, careworn, black-lunged character). Hickam overdoes the youthful rustic pose, and home truths clog the airwaves (“I’m sorry you got troubles, Sonny, but that’s called life”). But in its quiet, sentimental, coming-of-age way, Hickam’s story is involving, and he paints a nice landscape: “Coalwood’s houses were jammed between steep, humpbacked mountains packed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other.” And the ending—a happy one, all around—couldn’t be too sweet for Coalwood’s deserving townsfolk.
A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33516-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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