A memoir about growing up as the daughter of a radical father and a hippie mother—but mostly just about growing up. The author was born in 1966 to parents deeply involved in the Zeitgeist. Her father spent two years in jail as a member of the radical Weathermen underground. Michaels, a contributing editor at the Threepenny Review, a literary journal, spent a pre-kindergarten year on the road with her mother and stepfather, living out of a mail van, before settling down to an alternative lifestyle in northern California. But having central casting’s ’60s parents doesn—t by itself make for a riveting life story, and a short way into this memoir, it strikes the reader that there’s really nothing of enormous consequence to Michaels’s life. Even her parents come across as straighter than might have been expected: Her father stayed a radical longer than most of his contemporaries, but there’s no mention of drugs in their lives, and very little sex. Michaels is really just striving to fit the description her grandmother offers of her mother: “She could take a casual day and make it interesting.” Sometimes Michaels fails: The days are just too casual, the happenings too trivial, to carry the weight Michaels tries to give them. Sometimes she succeeds, using vivid memories of growing up, being shuttled back and forth between divorced parents, going to college, trekking through Nepal, and getting married to reflect on life, love, and loss. And if at times she seems perilously close to slipping into the maudlin, especially as she describes her years of simmering, subconscious anger at her father for leaving her and going to jail, Michaels’s finely crafted, lucid prose saves her from going over the edge. A decent autobiography, but a good—sometimes excellent—essay that reflects the counterculture less by the happenings it describes than by the intensity and honesty with which it is written.
Pub Date: July 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-83739-1
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
