A brief (112-page) reminiscence by one of America's greatest prose stylists. Recounting her relationships with her southern Jewish family and especially with her "kissing cousin," Katie Pyle, Calisher in her first nonfiction work threads her way through the memories and mystifications of a lifetime. The result is a volume that is at once immensely touching, frequently hilarious, and superbly written. Raised on the outskirts of New York City in a family that boasted more than an ordinary number of "individualists," Calisher depicts with a sure hand the tensions and tendernesses of family life. Particularly haunting is her portrait of Katie, a spinster of phenomenal resilience and dedication whose "secret" supplies the frame of Calisher's tale. If there is one quibble here, it is that the "secret," when it is finally revealed, is predictable and sentimental. But as she ranges back and forth between the family's Long Island home of her childhood, a faintly sinister "holiday" in Atlantic City, and the Florida retirement community where Katie eventually ends up, Calisher comments with her usual subtlety and perceptiveness on the nature of love, the pleasures of language, the persistence of memory. A fitting companion to—and as evocative and precise as—Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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