by John Willis Berry Jr. edited by Kimberly Berry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2017
An unusual remembrance that presents the experience of mental illness from the inside.
A posthumously published memoir written in the 1960s by a mentally ill African-American man who grew up in Mississippi during the Great Depression and later migrated to Michigan and Ohio.
Readers may want to start with this book’s afterword, which offers the late author’s granddaughter’s explanation that “He was sick, and he was delusional. He committed horrible crimes. And he believed that he was the Messiah. And help was not available to him as a poor black man.” Berry begins his story by recounting his first year in school, around 1930, during which he was frequently teased and bullied by both white and black children: “I had light-colored skin, like that of my mother, and it was this factor that opened a new door to another hell of color for me,” he writes. Quickly, he moves his memoir forward to when he was 11, lying down under a tree, contemplating the multitude of injustices in the world: “So I just lay there thinking until I thought I fell asleep, but was to realize later that I had died instead, and saw that I was in the midst of a world of water, which was moving back and forth.” What follows are many other sometimes-poetic, often rambling pages describing his travels through water, sky, and time; then Berry “returns” home after what feels like many years, confused and disoriented. The author offers no explanation for this passage of time, and from this point on, Berry says that he’s convinced he’s both dead and alive. However, there’s a disarming lucidity to his prose when he depicts his later life in Detroit. He marries, has children, and holds down three jobs at once—until he attempts to kill his wife. However, other than the facts of his marriage and his children, it’s impossible for readers to know which parts of the memoir are true and which are purely delusions. Overall, it’s a dark and disturbing, if difficult-to-follow, journey through the mind of a man who was both kind and dangerous and who suffered a lifetime of untreated illness.
An unusual remembrance that presents the experience of mental illness from the inside.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-976463-75-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.