by Janet Godwin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2017
While it requires patience to read, this account delivers an informative, poignant, and frequently jubilant tribute to the...
A debut family biography and memoir, presented through three narrative voices, depicts life on the Alabama-Georgia border from 1885 to 1964.
In 1915, in northeastern Alabama, a typhoid epidemic took the lives of Hugh Godwin’s beloved wife, Mattie, and their 11-year-old son, Right Handy. Shug Godwin was only 4 at the time, but this was when Hugh began telling him stories about his family. Only four years later, Hugh died. Shug, second to last in a line of 14 siblings, immediately assumed responsibility for his baby sister: “I understood from a very early age that I did not want and would not accept the luxury of a carefree childhood, but instead I’ve always been committed to watching out for and taking care of others.” Although his father earned his living from the farm, Shug learned early on that he could supplement the family’s meager income with moonshine. In 1924, at 12, he began building his own whiskey stills and developed a steady list of customers. Along the way, between making and delivering whiskey, Shug discovered that he loved working with close family friend John Owens at his sawmill. Logging and milling became Shug’s major business as he moved into adulthood. He eventually married John’s daughter, Vesta, a childhood friend, and they had five kids. The author was the fourth of these. The dense, meandering work tells the story of the Godwin and Owens families, first narrated by Hugh, then by Shug, and finally by Meyer, who carries the tale to her 1964 high school graduation. Through the three of them, the book creates vivid images of life in the rural and small-town South, first in Alabama, where Shug grew up, and then across the state line outside Tallapoosa, Georgia, where he and Vesta raised their children. Every vignette is loaded with colorful, minute details of daily life. But the monologues are often confusing. They veer off into tangents that spill out through stream-of-consciousness sentences that can twist their way through a full page without taking a deep breath.
While it requires patience to read, this account delivers an informative, poignant, and frequently jubilant tribute to the power of a family’s love.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-0555-5
Page Count: 590
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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