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WHEN THE DIAMONDS WERE GONE

Name: WHEN THE DIAMONDS WERE GONE
Author: Julian Padowicz
ISBN: 978-0-89733-919-3

A JEWISH REFUGEE COMES OF AGE IN AMERICA IN THE 1940S

by Julian Padowicz ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2015

A sad and curious memoir that will make others with unhappy childhoods know they’re not alone.

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Padowicz (A Scandal in Venice, 2013, etc.) adds the memoir of his years as a refugee in the United States to his earlier works about his and his mother’s escape from Poland during World War II.

The author recounts one of the most difficult periods in any life: getting through school. Doomed from the beginning, he began in a French school in Warsaw, followed by a Brazilian school before coming to New York. Padowicz couldn’t speak the language of any school he attended, and he possessed only rudimentary English when he started fourth grade at boarding school in 1942. With only the headmaster’s wife to tutor him, he slowly picked up the language, but his difficulty focusing and finishing reading assignments would be lifelong challenges. Only his writing and storytelling talent got him through, as his popular Kip and Amanda books now attest. Padowicz speaks kindly of his mother and her admonitions to succeed and, above all, tell no one that he was Jewish. His best times and spurts of normalcy were holidays staying with his aunt and uncle, the caricaturist, Arthur Szyk, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Eventually, Padowicz’s mother married a Frenchman, Pierre, and they moved to Montreal. A normal family life was not to be, and his mother’s visits, now fewer and further between, invariably included suggestions, even bribes, that he get a nose job. It was not until college that he finally discovered his only weapon was a threat to join a temple. The author’s accounts of his school days are fairly predictable, and his family life was nearly nonexistent. His one relationship, in the end, was long and unsatisfactory. He has dealt with his mother as most neglected children do, always loving and hoping, ever disappointed.

A sad and curious memoir that will make others with unhappy childhoods know they’re not alone.

Pub Date: July 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-89733-919-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)