An intriguing adventure story that often doesn’t ring true. Caveat emptor.
The improbable story of how Chapman was kidnapped from her rural Colombian village at the age of 5 and abandoned in the jungle.
According to the tale, pieced together by her daughter, Vanessa James, Chapman adopted monkey ways—eating what they ate, climbing trees and mimicking their calls—until five years later, when she connected with some hunters in the hopes of being returned to her family. Instead, she was left in a brothel on the outskirts of the nearby city. There she was kept in semislavery as a house servant. Gradually, she relearned Spanish and the rudiments of civilized life. Escaping, she fell in with other homeless children and was ultimately taken in by a brutal Mafia family, where she was again reduced to servitude. The book ends when the author, around the age of 14, was rescued by a neighbor's daughter, who offered her a real home in another town. Although ostensibly written as a first-person account by Chapman, the preface by James and the epilogue by novelist Barrett-Lee (One Day, Someday, 2003, etc.) provide a different picture. James explains how she was intrigued by her mother's stories about life among the monkeys and also by the oddity of her own upbringing—for example, having to sit and howl at her mother's feet before being fed. She decided “to piece together mum's tangled memories” about the “magical world” living in the jungle with a tribe of monkeys and the life of a Colombian street child, characterized by “kidnappings, abductions, drugs, crime, murder and child abuse.” Barrett-Lee admits that she was given “a huge, unwieldy document” to work with, which she then scripted.
An intriguing adventure story that often doesn’t ring true. Caveat emptor.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1605984742
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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