In a weighty account, kitchen sink included, a proper, upper- class mother visits her estranged daughter in India and during their perambulations through the countryside achieve a better, if not complete, appreciation for each other's viewpoint. Nothing escapes the descriptive attack of Hadley, a blue- blooded, experienced magazine and travel writer, as she and daughter Veronica (a.k.a. Elsa Cloud) travel through the subcontinent in class, visiting the palaces of maharajahs, touring game preserves, participating in some wild Hindu festivals, and finally reaching Veronica's Buddhist redoubt near the home of the Dalai Lama. Keen of eye and ear, Hadley gives a detailed disquisition on India's flora and fauna, history, geography, religions, and foods as well as individual portraits of Indian holy men, intellectuals, and ordinary folk—all of which can leave a reader gasping under its magnitude. But India's spiritualism, its conjoining of asceticism and erotica, its architecture and landscape, principally form the stage for Hadley's quest to come to terms with her 25-year-old daughter's rebellion—which one suspects is not entirely deep-seated—against her materially based upbringing—as well as Hadley's fixations on her own relationship with her frigid mother. Hadley avoids confrontations with Veronica, while confiding her anxieties and complaints to her reader: She wonders whether she has repeated her mother's mistakes in raising Veronica; she questions whether Veronica has inherited the emotional coldness of her own mother. In between, Hadley delivers flashbacks of a privileged if often loveless childhood, her failed teenage marriage, and her unusually adventurous life with Veronica's father, a dreamy geologist who eventually abandoned the family. All of this, including her therapist's Jungian admonitions, are connected in some way; but even as the reader sometimes wishes Hadley's writings were less fevered, one must admire her honesty and industriousness in producing a rather monumental work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-885983-16-6
Page Count: 625
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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