Hewitt’s (Georgia's Great Undertaking, 2014, etc.) insightful family memoir provides a glimpse into the life of a complicated woman.
Maggie Mosteller McLendon lived a full life. She grew up listening to her father’s and grandfather’s stories of the hardships suffered by Southerners during the Civil War and died after witnessing the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement. From her little corner of the world, Maggie observed a great deal of change while clinging to her values and traditions. Author Hewitt was very close with Grandmother Maggie. She spent a good deal of her youth with her grandparents in Thermal, Alabama, a small mining town not far from Birmingham. Hewitt’s memories of baking gingerbread and thumbing through old photo albums portray an enchanting childhood despite the threat of poverty looming in the background. Yet as Linda grows older, she realizes that Maggie is a complicated woman, and she struggles to reconcile her beloved grandmother with a woman who later vehemently blames women and blacks for the troubles of modern society. Hewitt paints a vivid portrait of a strong, intelligent and multifaceted person who is alternately admirable and upsetting. Hewitt’s memoir is an honest study, balancing idyllic childhood memories with a more realistic and clinical look at the past. It’s captivating to get to know Maggie through the eyes of a child, and later, from the viewpoint of an adult. The collapse of a small industrial Southern town runs parallel to Maggie’s story, the effects of time taking its toll on both the woman and the place. Though personal reflection can hobble momentum, particularly in the final chapter, Maggie and her family stories will still entertain those outside the family. At its best, Maggie’s recollections of neighbors and friends feel like trading gossip over the backyard fence. The vintage photographs and clever drawings by Robert Hewitt are a satisfying addition to the text.
Hewitt’s memoir leaves us with the memory of a woman who is beautiful, strong, sad and difficult; i.e., human.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: ArbeitenZeit Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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