An uneven memoir full of meticulous details and some funny moments.
The story of the author’s search for a meaningful life after tragedy.
Rich (Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's Underworld, 1993) begins her narrative shortly after the death of her mother and murder of her father when she was in her teens. In a straightforward, journalistic style, she chronicles how, as an orphan in Alaska, she drifted from one friend’s home to another, attended high school, made friends, and explored nature, all while searching for a normal lifestyle. She then moves on to discuss her move to New York City, her college days, her first marriage, and her ventures into journalism. Eventually, Rich shares the details of writing her first memoir, Johnny’s Girl, which started out as a series of newspaper articles and was later made into a Hallmark TV movie. Once she moves past those early years, the author’s writing becomes somewhat less rote, and she focuses on minute details of her childhood and touching, sometimes-humorous tales of her grandfather, who suffered from dementia and struggled against a woman’s plot to marry him and take his money. Rich’s tone grows more serious as she discusses her bout with breast cancer and the frightening decisions she had to make during that period. She quickly follows with her troubles conceiving a child with her second husband and the efforts they made to create a family via fertility treatments and adoption. The second half of the book is far more vibrant and emotionally gripping than the first, allowing readers a closer look at the author as she is today rather than the awkward adolescent she used to be. For those who read Johnny’s Girl and want to know what happened next, this book has the answers.
An uneven memoir full of meticulous details and some funny moments.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943328-50-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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