An inspiring and moving account of a caring family.
A former communications professor and clinical psychologist takes readers on a journey of death, grief, and acceptance in this memoir.
Hocker (co-author: Interpersonal Conflict, 2013) grew up in a close-knit family that moved frequently due to her father’s work as a minister. During the tumultuous decades of the 1950s to ’70s, his support of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War often made his tenures at conservative churches brief. Although the author’s parents did not approve of her two divorces from men they had grown to love, they supported her choices. The death of her brother Ed’s new wife from lung cancer in 2002 was distressing but proved how caring the Hockers were as a unit. The discovery of multiple lesions on the brain of the author’s sister, Janice, in 2004 was devastating to the whole family but especially to Hocker, who had always had a close relationship with her younger sibling. As the author floundered in her sorrow, her mother faced a heart-rending cancer diagnosis. Hocker—again—left her practice, husband, and Montana home to share her mother’s final weeks. The author and Ed’s attempts to help their father adjust to life as a widower were unsuccessful, causing the clan to lose a fourth member in just over two years. Designated as the family archivist (due to interest, not professional training) even before the cluster of tragedies, Hocker sorted through belongings, stored at her parents’ cabin “Shalom,” close to an old ghost town and cemetery called Tincup, as she attempted to overcome her grief. The structure of this volume is somewhat confusing, as the beginning provides only slightly relevant information about the ending of the author’s first marriage. But as the tale transitions to the core of the memoir, the absorbing love stories—while heartbreaking—should carry readers along. Hocker skillfully presents the narrative of dying, managing to make it quite beautiful. A long interlude concerning family history and genealogy, while intriguing, disturbs the flow of the account and is better suited to a different narrative. But overall, the author, perhaps drawing on her professional background, makes a disturbing chain of events touching and ultimately uplifting. Despite its unusual structure and inherent sadness, this book is well worth reading.
An inspiring and moving account of a caring family.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-341-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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