An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary...
In another poignant addition to the literary legacy of 9/11, a young widow recalls for their infant daughter the father she will never know.
Alternating an account of her experiences after husband Jeremy died on Flight 93 with memories of their first meeting and subsequent relationship, Glick has produced an act of preservation as much as of mourning. Determined that their daughter Emmy, three months old when he died, should know her father, Glick recollects all the details she hopes will give a sense of Jeremy: his love of sport, especially judo, the way he’d sneak out of the house to see his friends, their roller-coaster relationship, and his success as a salesman. She recalls the day in 1984 when she first sat next to him in ninth-grade biology. She disliked Jeremy’s enormous Afro, which she thought made him look like a cannibal, but she enjoyed his sense of humor, and the two soon became friends. They sometimes dated, sometimes broke up for long periods of time, especially in college, but they always stayed in touch, either personally or through Jeremy’s many friends. They married in 1996 and three years later bought a lakeside home in New Jersey, where Glick, who had experienced a number of miscarriages, finally became pregnant with Emmy. As she records their past, she also describes the period following 9/11: her grief; the stress of dealing with the media; interviews with FBI; her several visits to the White House, where she met with President Bush. Therapy sessions joined her with other women who had lost loved ones that day, but nothing really prepared her for such harrowing experiences as receiving Jeremy’s few remains (teeth and a datebook) and listening to the tape from the Flight 93 black box.
An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary families.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31921-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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