Eye-opening and courageous.
Independent Fundamentalist Mormon husband Darger and his three “sister wives” offer a candid, often engaging account of how and why they chose to enter into an outlawed form of marriage.
Best known as the inspiration for the controversial HBO series Big Love, all four Dargers were products of successful polygamist marriages. “[O]ur childhoods were great,” they write, “and were a big factor in our decision to pursue the same family structure in our own lives.” Darger met his first two wives, Vicki and her cousin Alina, when the three of them were preteens, but serious dating did not begin until high school. At that point, Darger was at the center of what he admits was “an unusual love story, even within the Fundamentalist Mormon culture.” With the blessing of all but one father, he began courting both Vicki and Alina, who in turn worked on solidifying the personal relationship they had with each other. After 18 months, the three married and began their lives together. Ten years later, in 2000, the trio welcomed a third wife, Vicki’s sister Valerie (who had left another, unsuccessful polygamist marriage), into their family. The tragic death of Alina’s newly born child in 2001 brought unwanted legal and media scrutiny into their lives, but rather than destroy the family, it “started [them] on the road to activism to fight anti-polygamy biases.” The Dargers do not evangelize for what they admit is a challenging lifestyle. Rather, with admirable honesty and dignity, they ask readers to respect their choice to live by the tenets of their faith.
Eye-opening and courageous.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-207404-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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