by Karen Salyer McElmurray ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2004
Labored, self-indulgent womb-gazing.
Novelist McElmurray (Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, 1999) recounts in overwrought prose how she gave up her newborn son for adoption and lived to regret it.
Although she can’t remember whether her baby was born in June or July 1973, the author describes vividly the harrowing experience of giving birth at age 16. She never explicitly explains why she decided to give up her son, or why she refused to allow her father to adopt him, but she makes it abundantly clear that her own parents were poor role models, dwelling on the awfulness of her mother, an agoraphobic, controlling woman obsessed with cleanliness and incapable of showing love. When her parents divorced, McElmurray chose to live with her father and quickly plunged into a world of drugs, drinking, and teenage sex. A pregnant runaway at 15, she lived the hippie life until hauled home by her father and forced into marriage. Winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, her memoir features a graphic account of her hippie days that is creative indeed. What McElmurray (Creative Writing/Georgia College and State Univ.) cannot remember she recreates, leaving the reader wondering how much of her story is real and how much spun from an inventive writer’s brain. Once divorced from her husband, she continued her education and became a teacher. From an adult perspective, she analyzes her subsequent sexual behavior, detailing various unrewarding love affairs. She also covers a reunion with her stifled mother, eventual marriage to an appreciative man, and her long-delayed efforts to locate her son.
Labored, self-indulgent womb-gazing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-8203-2681-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
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
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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
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