An authentic, matter-of-fact, nonpolemical depiction of Palestinian life.
A Palestinian-American remembers an idyllic pre-1948 childhood in Palestine.
Because of restrictions on economic opportunity, Nammar was forced to leave his beloved homeland at age 23. Here, he looks back at this bittersweet era of his youth. “Balance” marked the community he knew as a child, where the three Abrahamic religions resided in harmony, socializing and patronizing each other’s businesses within a curious mixture of Turkish, Armenian, Arab and Jewish customs. Born to an old, well-established family in the Haret al-Nammareh neighborhood—his father was a tour guide, and his mother was an educated refugee of the Armenian genocide—Nammar generally enjoyed a bountiful, bucolic first six years of life in Palestine. All changed abruptly when Zionist agitation broke out, marked by such events as a machine gun attack on his school bus and the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, where Nammar’s older brother, Mihran, worked at the front desk. After Israeli independence, the Palestinian neighborhoods were inhabited by Israelis in what Nammar describes as a deliberate Zionist policy of nikayon, or ethnic cleansing. Herded into a military zone, Nammar’s father and Mihran were detained in prison without explanation. Eventually, the family was reunited but without employment or prospects. The author writes movingly of his education by the nuns and his refuge at the Jerusalem YMCA, where he was both embraced for his athleticism and eventually marginalized, rejected for Israel’s national basketball team because of his nationality.
An authentic, matter-of-fact, nonpolemical depiction of Palestinian life.Pub Date: July 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56656-886-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Olive Branch/Interlink
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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