Offers some sweet illuminations, but a bit too light and friction-less for a book on death and mother-daughter relationships.
Wall Street Journal culture reporter Rosman uses her journalistic skills to work through her grief over the death of her mother at age 60 from lung cancer.
In the Journal, the author wrote about attempts to better understand her mother through the perspective of those who knew her as a Pilates instructor and a collector of vintage glassware. Rosman is a solid writer and storyteller, and she portrays her mother as entertainingly sharp, even in her excruciating last days. Her reporting turns up some interesting stories. At Sloan-Kettering, where Suzy underwent aggressive surgery, a Haitian-born doctor whose humanity was a touchstone for the family truly understood their struggles—he had lost his own father to a rare cancer just weeks before. As Rosman continued her journey of discovery about her mother, some had doubts about her intentions. At a dinner party she met a man who “thought my premise—to use his term—was bullshit. ‘You’re assuming the things you find out about have underlying meaning…But really you have no way of knowing what, if anything, any of your discoveries signify.’ ” The author admits that “he wasn’t necessarily wrong,” but “if you are open to finding meaning—which is almost always an exercise of faith and almost never an exercise in certainty—you might find meaning.” Ultimately, this is not a book for skeptics; it’s for readers who see in Rosman and Suzy something like their own relationship with their mother (or daughter), and who might need to be reminded that a mother is a person too.
Offers some sweet illuminations, but a bit too light and friction-less for a book on death and mother-daughter relationships.Pub Date: April 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173523-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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