by Kevin Keck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008
Laugh-out-loud memoir that also offers serious food for thought for those tempted to seek the comforts of home when...
Another irreverent coming-of-age saga from Keck (Oedipus Wrecked, 2005, etc.).
Like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs before him, the author enchants and occasionally horrifies with self-deprecating tales of familial dysfunction as he exposes the bumps encountered thus far on his road to self-discovery. Displaying a flair for the surprisingly droll, Keck unravels the events that prompted his exodus from graduate school at Syracuse back to his native North Carolina to try and compose himself. He wastes no time confessing his pill-popping, pot-loving proclivities and immediately draws in the reader by revealing the eccentricities that sprang from his precarious mental state. “New Year’s Eve 1999,” the memoir begins. “It was three in the morning, and I was parked at a gas station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, checking my temperature with a rectal thermometer.” Keck came by his paranoiac and bacteriophobic tendencies honestly, he demonstrates. At one point during his young adulthood, his violence-prone mother tried to rouse him out of bed by holding a butcher’s knife to his throat and yelling, “Goddammit! Get up, you bitch, or I’ll kill you!” Alongside tales of familial hardship, including moving accounts of his grandmother’s descent into dementia and his grandfather’s death, runs a humorous and sometimes poignant commentary on religion and spirituality that lends the memoir some structure. Lamenting the paucity of lines assigned to his small role in a church skit based on the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Keck can’t resist adding, “If you have but a loose association with the church, then you have most likely heard this story of Jesus whipping up a thirty-minute meal.” Cheeky views such as this set the tone in an endearing narrative that shows a lost writer slowly finding his way.
Laugh-out-loud memoir that also offers serious food for thought for those tempted to seek the comforts of home when negotiating the trials of adulthood.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-416-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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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