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TETA, MOTHER, AND ME

Name: TETA, MOTHER, AND ME
Author: Jean Said Makdisi
ISBN: 0-393-06156-6

THREE GENERATIONS OF ARAB WOMEN

by Jean Said Makdisi ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2006

Well-written and quite revealing.

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Makdisi (Beirut Fragments, 1990) blends feminism and international politics in this examination of the lives and aspirations of the women of her family over roughly the last century.

Born in Jerusalem to Arab Christians, Makdisi was raised by her grandmother Teta and mother to envision and train herself for “a perfect domestic life,” an idea that “was as much a part of our feminine existence as the air we breathed.” When she came of age, she writes, Makdisi and the women of her own generation dismissed the elders: “We thought they lacked strength, or imagination, or gratitude, or willpower, or intellect, or something.” Living through the Lebanese civil war tempered such attitudes, and she embarked on a long project to reconstruct the elders’ lives and times in order to understand just how much strength, and intellect, and imagination they had. Much of Makdisi’s gentle and largely uncomplaining account is a catalogue of disappointments, for the lives of her forebears did not often match their dreams; her father, for instance, had to return to Palestine from his cherished America to satisfy his mother’s deathbed bidding, “but he never really forgave her for deflecting him from what he had seen as his destiny in the New World.” Just so, where she had always thought of Teta as a ghostly, elderly figure shrouded in black who moved silently throughout the house, Makdisi discovers that the Teta of the 1900s was a vivacious, beloved presence independent-minded enough to reject “the festive henna evenings that preceded weddings, especially in Galilee, where she now lived,” a rejection that subtly ties in to Makdisi’s earlier disquisition on why so many young Arabs are now taking the veil—“and many young women, claiming their individual right to do so, are as zealous in this regard as their mothers or grandmothers were in removing it.”

Well-written and quite revealing.

Pub Date: April 24, 2006

ISBN: 0-393-06156-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)