A candid account of personal devastation and renewal.
In her debut memoir, Freed, a Mississippi coastal resident, recounts the sudden breakup of her marriage on the eve of Hurricane Katrina.
Having recently returned from a pleasant trip to Miami to visit her military surgeon husband, Conner, Freed was shocked to receive an email from him suggesting the two of them ought to divorce. Conner suggested that if they were to move forward, he would like Freed, a successful math professor, to undergo breast enlargement and commit to sex at least once a day. Aware that Conner was under a lot of pressure and was a high-functioning alcoholic, Freed tried unsuccessfully to reason with him. With Hurricane Katrina expected to make landfall at any time, Freed tried to come to grips with their failed relationship, even while evacuating her coastal home with her toddler-aged daughter, Genoa. After waiting out the storm on safer ground with a neighboring couple, Freed returned to find her house and the area she called home decimated. Still reeling from the sense that she had been married to a man she didn’t know, and with no home to return to, Freed had to hit the ground running—dealing with FEMA, insurance adjustors, divorce attorneys, even a private detective she employed to shadow her husband in Miami. With the help of friends and family, Freed was able to put her life back together and face the future on her own terms as an academic and single mother. Freed’s prose is often gorgeous and surprising, as when, amid the chaos and destruction, she writes: “The air tasted delicious. I swallowed and felt her deep inside me, filling me up. She was full of energy. We were explorers in her world. She led us. The ominous excitement, frightening and invigorating, teased us forward…we were respectful and vigilant. We knew we were not in charge.” While the memoir certainly succeeds at the personal, confessional level, the sporadic attempts at broader social commentary can be rather nearsighted. It’s difficult not to balk, for instance, when white, affluent Freed relates a brief shared moment at Wal-Mart with “Another mother, obese, with gold and missing teeth, and two children in worn clothes,” prompting Freed’s observation of how “wonderfully equalizing” Katrina was.
A candid account of personal devastation and renewal.Pub Date: April 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499184358
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 28, 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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