As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s...
A daughter recounts a legacy of violence in this debut memoir.
One October, Jose Venegas prepared for his annual trip from Chicago, where he lived with his wife and children, to his native Mexico. As usual, he took clothing and household goods for his parents and extended family. But this time, he also bought a bulletproof vest and packed into steel trunks all the guns he had stored in the house. “Your father is never coming back,” his wife announced a few days later. For nearly 15 years, Venegas had no contact with her father, who, she learned, had killed her uncle and attempted to murder many other men. He was, she believed, violent, volatile and a coward for leaving his family unprotected. Furious with her father, she felt alienated from her mother, an evangelical Christian with no aspirations for her daughter’s future. When Venegas said she wanted to go to college, her mother told her to apply instead for a job as a cashier at Kmart: “You could drop out of school, make some good money,” she said. The author, however, followed her dream, enrolling as an economics major at the University of Illinois and studying abroad in Spain. Haunted by a past she did not understand, she gave in to her boyfriend’s urging to reconnect with her father. That reunion led to regular visits, during which she discovered how deeply imbedded he was in a culture of violence and retribution. At age 10, he blew the head off a rattlesnake with his father’s rifle; soon after, his mother pressed a knife into his hands, urging him to retaliate against a bully; two years later, she gave him a gun to use for revenge. Killing, he learned, was expected of a man, and drinking exacerbated his violence.
As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s love, beset by regrets and seared by brutality.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-11731-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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