The occasional art is more engaging than the diary itself.
The situation—a hijacking—is dramatic, but this teenage diary is tedious.
Eighteen-year-old Kalli was leaving her home in Colombia for a summer stint on an Israeli kibbutz—and what should have been a fun, coming-of-age summer adventure turned into a grueling nightmare. Kalli’s flight was hijacked, and she was taken hostage by the National Liberation Army. She and her fellow hostages spent a year deep in the jungle, pawns in a complex political game. Here, Kalli recalls that. She writes of her mood swings, her dreams and her relationships with the other hostages. (Kalli’s father was also kidnapped, and he at times gives her strength—other times, of course, they quarrel.) She also chronicles her minor health problems—an ulcer, a staph infection, headaches, diarrhea. During captivity, she finds several forms of release, including prayer and drawing (her sketches are scattered throughout the book). The hostages are relatively well-treated—one of Kalli’s biggest complaints is that, because there’s nothing to do but smoke, bathe and eat, and play volleyball, chess and Battleship, she’s bored. Readers, plowing though her monotonous chronicle of those activities, will be bored, too. A prefatory essay, giving a bit more context about guerilla kidnappings in Colombia, would have been helpful.
The occasional art is more engaging than the diary itself.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9131-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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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