A sympathetic, instructive story of resilience.
A girl learns how much grit and grace it takes to make it out of poverty in this debut memoir.
Singer/songwriter Moore opens her recollection of her childhood on a portentous note: her grandmother Dot revealed that spirits were after the young girl. This detail would prove prophetic for Moore, whose memoir is full of accounts of visitations from her late grandmother. But these spirits were nothing, it seemed, compared to the harm that living people inflicted on her. She and her sister were raised by her grandmother and her hot-tempered, teenage mother, and the author writes that she had to provide her mother with just the right amount of eye contact to avoid beatings. In one incident, she says, her mother burned her sister’s leg with an iron and lied about it; in another, she writes that her mother’s one-time boyfriend molested her and her sister. The family moved from city to city, relative to relative, as they tried to survive. The abuse persisted, Moore says; once, her mother broke a plaque depicting Jesus’ Crucifixion over the head of her then-stepfather. After the author became pregnant from a rape, she had an abortion and ran away from home and eked out a living with her sister and their friends, who stole to survive. After several returns home and failed, injurious relationships, she found a partner who proved reliable—and brave enough to stand up to her mother. Overall, the memoir is unrelenting in its intensity; it often seems as if the domestic and sexual violence will never end. But even more remarkable is Moore’s approach to describing her traumas, which is laudably unsentimental, unflinchingly realistic, and even occasionally witty. Despite the author’s apparent lack of interest in sugarcoating her experiences, she ends her memoir, convincingly, on a note of optimism. Perhaps it’s the very same optimism that helped her live through unfathomable cruelty so that she could go on to become a successful musician.
A sympathetic, instructive story of resilience.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 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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