First-time author Aldrich has certainly penned an original work, but it’s one that tries too hard to be worldly and jarring. Aldrich sacrifices autobiography for agenda, making the reader question her credibility at times (as at the start, when she claims she watched her family interact from her —unborn position—). The key figure in the narrative is Aldrich’s mother, an admittedly weird woman whose obsession with cleanliness extended to rarely cooking meals and refusing to open any windows. The reader feels confused about whether she has obsessive-compulsive disorder or whether her cleaning craze is simply an extension of the hyperfemininity she tries to instill in her daughters. From her mother Aldrich learned to pick at her food and bury her grief for her drowned older sister, who is scarcely mentioned in the book after her death is rather dispassionately discussed. As a rebellious adolescent, Aldrich was dispatched to a second-tier private school, where her only solace came in riding her horse, Alert. (The chapter on horseback riding is the most heartfelt segment of the book.) In college, she engaged in two disastrous affairs with married professors, one of whom divorced his wife and briefly married Aldrich. In the end, though, a visit to a sage fortune-teller helped her to see that she had some power to reinvent the patterns of her life. Now remarried and with a daughter, Aldrich has taken up gardening and revels in prolonging any really dirty task outdoors. When her pristine childhood dolls were sent for her own daughter’s use, Aldrich buried them all in the garden, stuffing their painted ruby lips with black earth. Too clever by half, but not personal enough to be whole, despite its encouraging conclusion.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-02748-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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