Be forewarned: After you read this beautiful account of the small triumphs and not-so-small heartbreaks of foster care, you...
Harrison (Another Place at the Table, 2003) has opened her home to more than 100 foster children. In this memoir, she focuses on just one.
Foster parents know that, unless they are prepared to take a child on very short notice, they shouldn’t answer the phone late Friday afternoon. Seasoned foster mom Kathy Harrison is a little surprised to find herself not only accepting just such a last-minute placement, but choosing, from among the three children for whom her social worker was trying to find beds, the one who sounded the most challenging. At six, Daisy was taking an inordinate number of psychiatric medications, she didn’t talk much, and she refused to eat. She twirled in circles or flapped her hands like wings when anxious. But after several weeks with the Harrisons, Daisy, well, blossoms, emerging as a confident, sharp child. Eventually, she trusts Kathy enough to reveal details of heinous sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. Though Harrison takes pains to make clear that children at every socio-economic level are abused and neglected, she allows that one wouldn’t have expected Daisy’s family to land in the social-services net—Daisy’s grandmother is a well-heeled attorney, and her mom a flaky feng-shui devotee. Helping Daisy adjust to her new surroundings isn’t the only task on Harrison’s plate. Her daughter Karen, 13, has just been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, and another foster child, Jazzy, 8, is leaving the Harrison family to be adopted. This is good news, but Jazzy, who feels at home with the Harrisons, doesn’t want to go. Throughout, Harrison is endearingly matter-of-fact, even humble, about the hard but rewarding work to which she has been called.
Be forewarned: After you read this beautiful account of the small triumphs and not-so-small heartbreaks of foster care, you may find yourself scanning the web, trying to find out how to become a foster parent.Pub Date: April 6, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-465-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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