A moving musical essay that should strike all the right notes with a wide selection of readers.
A multiplatinum recording artist chronicles her life so far.
When Jewel (A Night Without Armor: Poems, 1999, etc.) first broke onto the scene in 1995, few probably looked upon the golden tresses and ethereal beauty staring back at them from the cover of “Pieces of You” and thought: “hard-assed Alaskan hick.” The cherubic voice on the recording suggested a rarified existence rather than the hardscrabbled reality the author actually endured growing up on the fringes of “the fishing village of Homer, Alaska.” Jewel was the product of an often cruel and dispassionate father and eccentric and absentee mother. Rather than just focusing on her rise as an artist, her career highlights, or music business machinations, Jewel renders an intimate portrait of a young woman who, although immensely talented, has spent her life “surviving and recovering and problem solving since being a toddler.” The autobiography is lushly descriptive, chronicling the author’s earliest days on the old “homestead,” singing in saloons, busking in Mexico, and later living out of broken-down automobiles while trying to make a living in the music business. The author mines her psyche for the benefit of both herself and anyone else embroiled in profound emotional crisis. Without being intrusive, selected lyrics and poems provide further insight into her worldview. Although critical of both parents, the author reserves the lion’s share of her unresolved heartbreak for her mother, who skittered on the periphery of her daughter's autonomous childhood before eventually returning again as the de facto business manager who swiftly plunged the wildly successful singer and songwriter into crushing debt. “I would never get an apology,” she writes. “I would never get a hug. And I would have killed for just a hug.”
A moving musical essay that should strike all the right notes with a wide selection of readers.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17433-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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