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A MESSAGE FROM GOD IN THE ATOMIC AGE

A MEMOIR

A lyrical and visionary memoir of depression, Puerto Rican identity, and young womanhood. Vilar, a Puerto Rican student at Syracuse University in 1988, attempts suicide and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. This memoir moves back and forth between the hospital and college, the hospital and Vilar's girlhood in Puerto Rico, and most of all, between the hospital and her reflections on her mother and grandmother, both of whom also attempted suicide. Her grandmother was Lolita Lebron, a Puerto Rican nationalist who, one afternoon, along with three male comrades, opened fire on the US Congress, declaring, ``I did not come here to kill, I came here to die.'' Lebron was sentenced to 57 years in prison and served 27. Irene's mother jumped from a speeding car, finally ending her life after years of threatening her unfaithful husband—and her young daughter—with her suicide. Eight-year-old Irene had tried unsuccessfully to keep her mother from leaping. The memoir explores Vilar's struggle with these ghosts and the conflicting legacies her grandmother and mother leave behind. Despite Lolita's years in prison, and the rape and torture she endured there, ``she knew how to find her voice in solitude.'' By contrast, ``Mama was a free woman in Puerto Rico and she ended up flung onto a road like a character in a gothic novel.'' Vilar reflects eloquently on the attraction of suicide for women. She perceptively explores, too, the unique paradoxes of Puerto Rican identity—American yet not American, a separate nation overshadowed, almost overwhelmed, by North America. Vilar's prose is stunning; she delivers exacting detail: for instance, the pathos of a new hat decorated with bird featrhers, worn by a disturbingly birdlike mental patient. Vilar not only tells her own story well, but, even more unusually, she sharply and originally negotiates larger subjects- -identity, narrative, patriarchy, nationalism, and motherhood. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)

Pub Date: July 31, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42281-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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