by Liz Pryor ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2016
An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.
A writer and life advice expert tells the story of how an unexpected teen pregnancy taught her unforgettable lessons in humility and courage.
At 17, Chicago native Pryor (What Did I Do Wrong?: When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over, 2006) had everything going for her: loving parents, wealth, and, most importantly of all, a bright future. Then the high school senior discovered she was pregnant. Because her family was Catholic, abortion was not an option. Anxious to keep up appearances, Pryor’s mother, Dorothy, located a home for unwed mothers in Indiana where she left her daughter to give birth before returning to Chicago and attending graduation. Feeling trapped “in [her] body [and] her life,” Pryor immediately realized that the “home” her mother had chosen was really a government-run facility for poor and delinquent girls that looked and felt like a prison. Dorothy made special arrangements for her daughter to be able to come and go as she pleased, but this made no difference since the facility was “in the middle of nowhere.” The food was “gnarly bad,” and the “school” consisted of a single room with a few magazines and books and no teacher. Living mostly on vending machine snacks and food from care packages, Pryor felt alone and frightened among the street-wise girls she met. But soon she found that beneath the tough exteriors of her fellow mothers-to-be were fears and vulnerabilities—about pregnancy, giving birth, and life itself—that matched her own. As she drew closer to the girls, the author also came into awareness of how many more choices her socially privileged status had given her, including the one to give her baby up for adoption. Pryor’s refusal to bury the truth of her experiences is the greatest strength of her book. Her honesty about a youthful error and desire to let that honesty define the rest of her life are both uplifting and inspiring.
An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9800-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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