by Kevin Jennings ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2006
Generous and illuminating.
Horatio Alger meets Dorothy Allison in this debut memoir about growing up and coming out.
The author’s father, a fundamentalist minister, died during the boy’s eighth birthday party. The family had always been dirt-poor, and now his mother had to find a way to scrape by on her own. Jennings loved reading, and whenever life in his North Carolina trailer park got him down, he escaped into books. But school was a trial: He was chubby, too smart for his own good—and attracted to other boys. A scholarship to Harvard got him out of the rural South into classrooms and dorms where it was okay to be brainy and, at least in the more progressive corners of Cambridge, okay to be gay. But Jennings’s awakening didn’t end in Harvard Square. The most affecting passages here describe his experiences teaching at elite private schools in New England. His students adored him, but administrators got nervous when Jennings wanted to speak publicly about his sexual orientation. This subtle but unequivocal discrimination eventually led him to found the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which works to make schools safe for gay students. Jennings describes the evangelical, racist South in which he grew up, without a trace of condescension. His mother emerges as a heroic, working-class feminist: fighting to keep food on the table, she eventually became the first woman in the Winston-Salem area to break through the glass ceiling at McDonald’s and be promoted to manager. When Jennings came out to her, she was initially perplexed and upset. But seeing that her diffidence was driving a wedge between them, she founded a gay parents’ support group. This memoir, which ends with Jennings delivering the eulogy at his mom’s funeral, would make any mother proud.
Generous and illuminating.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8070-7146-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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edited by Kevin Jennings
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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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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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