A nostalgia-infused ode to youthful stumbles and joys.
Lamirand’s memoir, a debut, recounts the friendships she formed during her first few years at Colorado College in the mid-’90s.
With wistful eloquence, Lamirand writes of “experiencing the beautiful beginning of what would become a bittersweet story of friendship and…blossoming into young adulthood” when she started college. Introverted, used to living in her family’s home, and prone to comparing the real world with Anne of Green Gables (“I could relate little to our modern times”), she was naïve at first, but she quickly met a group of girls who put her at ease: “the group,” whose members included beautiful Sophie and grunge-loving Selena, grew close through their shared experiences and explorations—primarily those related to young love. Lamirand developed an infatuation with Stéphane, a classmate who kept his distance, and all the girls displayed their creativity through the nicknames they bestowed upon the boys they met—Sexy Ears Sam and Squeaky Voice Gothic Boy. The title of Lamirand’s memoir may seem macabre—and the group did experiment with forming a coven—but her story is one of life’s daily dramas, all small in the grand scheme but monumental as they occur. (The title is a reference both to the author of the 1963 novel The Group and to the R.E.M. song “Exhuming McCarthy.”) Evocative images and impressions permeate the recollections, as when Lamirand writes of one of the group members, “Leigh always used her cigarette to express herself—with grace, sexuality, or pain—even with no one else around.” For readers of a certain generation, the mid-to-late ’90s setting is bound to evoke memories, particularly when references are made to The Limited, My So-Called Life, Pearl Jam, and other cultural markers. Jessica’s trajectory may be a common one, of which she is aware, but it’s told with uncommon finesse and warmth. It’s not told with brevity. The nearly 500 pages might have been condensed without loss to the overall effect, and the ending does not answer as many questions as might be desired.
A nostalgia-infused ode to youthful stumbles and joys.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 507
Publisher: Ambient Light Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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