Well-written and unspeakably sad, though often predictable.
A latter-day Thomas De Quincey who began “eating” when he was nine writes powerfully if repetitively about how drugs and alcohol destroyed his family and severely damaged him.
Novelist Brown (Lucky Town, 1994, etc.) here arranges in a broken chronology some previously published pieces and a few fresh ones, all of which are confessional and self-flagellant. The author drinks too much, snorts too much coke, smokes too much crack, fails to honor too many commitments; he steals and lies to his friends, to his wife, to his family, to—don’t be alarmed—himself! Hung over, Brown tries to teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to undergraduates, who see right through him. He torments a pet pig he bought after a binge to dulcify his bitter wife; he’s annoyed because the porker acts, well, like a pig. He tries AA but is put off by too-patent piety. Brown’s brother and sister are both addicts and both commit suicide (he shoots himself, she leaps from a bridge); the writer crafts for each of them a very strong essay, imagining the moment of suicide in some of his loveliest, most wrenching prose. Brown’s mother was also an addict, and he recalls the time when, carrying along five-year-old James for a night out with Mommy, she torched an apartment building. An old woman died in the fire, but the cops had insufficient evidence to convict, so Mommy went away for tax evasion instead. (She had been surreptitiously selling family property to support her habits.) The Browns are no Cleavers, but their sorrows are delineated in captivating language. Brown knows the puissance of the present tense, effectively uses the second person (in the essay on his sister), crafts some heart-breaking sentences, and generally makes you want simultaneously to slap and embrace him.
Well-written and unspeakably sad, though often predictable.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052151-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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