Vivid, painfully realistic coming-of-age memoir.
Post-feminist blogger and Bust magazine columnist Erlbaum recounts her rough-and-tumble, drug-and-sex-addled adolescence, focusing on a year spent in the New York City shelter system.
On Nov. 1, 1984, 15-year-old Janice checked into a shelter for young women to escape family abuse. The only white girl there, she was a constant target of harrowing verbal and physical violence. After six months, she moved to a group home run by a sadistically strict matron who seemed to delight in Machiavellian control tactics. Surrounded by a motley crew of colorful castoffs, Janice the Liar (the author does not let herself escape her own cleverly critical tongue) was surrounded by such freaks as Shirley the Nympho and Becky the Baby. Entrenched in the world of the “halfway homeless,” Erlbaum continued to attend high school, an archetypal over-intelligent underachiever who used her smarts in the service of scoring drugs and manipulating authority figures. Bored, insecure, sometimes simply nihilistic, the attractive redhead used her feminine wiles and generous endowment to become the school slut. Finally, at the tail end of a solitary acid trip, she found true love with tattooed Sebastian, a fellow damaged soul. Together, the Sid and Nancy Lite duo acquired (but later kicked) a nasty cocaine habit. Erlbaum writes with gusto and has an excellent sense of pacing. We come to care about her, perhaps because we are never unaware of her weaknesses and flaws. By the end, readers may feel they have relived their own painful, turbulent teen years.
Vivid, painfully realistic coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6422-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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