A middle-age paraplegic's essays on disability and the male perspective. Being crippled, says Kriegel (Falling into Life, 1991, etc.), can cause a man to lose his drive, his sense of purpose, and thus his courage. Handicapped women, one supposes, might face the same difficulties, but Kriegel doesn't clarify why they redefine his manhood, why as a man he is more challenged than a woman would be. Kriegel, who lost the use of his legs after a childhood bout with polio, is eloquent on the uses of anger: He describes the moment when, as a teenager, he realized his disability was permanent, his crazed, enraged flailing with fists against a windowsill until his knuckles were scraped and bloodied. He writes lyrically about his dreams of beaches, where his crutches and wheelchair are virtually useless; the modern supermarket; and relating to women as a paraplegic—though he provides few details of this central aspect of manhood. He recognizes the power of memory as a repository not only of events but of desires. Even as he settles into his 60s, he finds he's subject to the pull of unfulfilled ambitions. Kriegel wisely rejects the campfire bonding rituals of the ``gurus of the New American Masculinity,'' as well as the victimization endemic to the politics of gender and that he associates with men's movements. In a fine, challenging piece on the god Hephaestus, an attempt is made to render disability universal: ``What haunts Hephaestus haunts every cripple.'' Though his limp makes him mortal and he's cuckolded by Aphrodite, he is all man. In Hephaestus, Kriegel discovers the tough-mindedness he needs to overcome the twin temptations of rage and mawkish self-pity—in short, the will to endure. While Kriegel acknowledges that ``even as a word `manhood' leaves us in a sweat,'' it is a ``need to stand as a man'' that he values: strength, independence—the very same characteristics, oddly, that women have come to associate with their own femininist ideals of womanhood.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-8070-7230-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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