by Kathryn Harrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2004
Like the author’s previous examination of her relationship with her father (The Kiss, 1997): a dark ride taken with terrible...
The time has come to let her mother go, realizes novelist Harrison (The Seal Wife, 2002, etc.), who here delineates, in very short form, her wrenching journey to that emotional, stabbing moment.
After her third child was born and she had a tubal ligation, the author felt some sadness, knowing she would have no more children. But the sadness gradually took a plunge into depression, sparked by the decision to stop nursing her daughter and her son’s sudden onset of severe asthma. “I’d . . . relinquished that cherished perception of myself as my children's primal source of sustenance and love,” Harrison writes. She thought of herself as an agent of corruption, passing on her own childhood asthma to her son; more to the point, she feared she was hurtful to her children as her mother had been to her. Throughout her life, Harrison suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia, and anorexia, disorders that could be tracked without much effort right back to her mother’s treatment and eventual abandonment of her. Harrison recounts with grimness and grace making the painful connections: she loved breast-feeding partly because “I intended for my body to accuse my mother, testify to my having given the pound of flesh she’d withheld”; anorexia was both fulfillment of and vengeance for the knowledge that she had been an unwanted baby—“If she wants me dead . . . then I’ll do it for her . . . it wouldn’t be that she’d taken back the life she gave me, but that I had taken it away from her.” Her internist and analyst helped the author deal with her demons and spare her family; she ultimately decided to disinter her mother’s body and have it cremated. “It didn’t feel bearable—letting my mother go without having had her,” she acknowledges, but this unbearable act of survival was also necessary and healing.
Like the author’s previous examination of her relationship with her father (The Kiss, 1997): a dark ride taken with terrible clarity into the heart of misery, scorched to a luster.Pub Date: June 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6191-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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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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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