The American Dream, with quite a few bumps along the way.
The rough road of a refugee and immigrant.
Born six months before the Japanese invaded Java during World War II, the author was whisked away to exile in Jakarta along with her mother, siblings and other female relatives. She didn’t meet her father, who was imprisoned during the war, until she was six years old. When he returned home, he was a broken and remote man who barely acknowledged the daughter desperate for his attention. The signing of treaties did not mean a return to normalcy for the author’s family; as mixed-race Dutch Indonesians, they became targets of rising Indonesian nationalist sentiment. As a result, when Indonesia gained its independence, they emigrated to the Netherlands, and later, due to her father’s health, to Southern California. At an early age, Van Metta discovered a passion for dancing, and soon after arriving in San Diego, she landed a job as a dance instructor. At the studio, she fell quickly for Eldon, the wildly charismatic studio manager, and became pregnant soon thereafter. Her marriage to Eldon, instead of causing her to settle into family life, was the beginning of a frantic 12-year roller coaster through swinger’s parties, prostitution and exotic dancing, all driven by her husband’s insatiable, pathologically selfish and often violent need for sex, power and money. Making Change is a harrowing read, not only because of what the author and her three children endured, but also because of the depths of the author’s denial, fear and self-degradation. She is quite frank about her profound naivete and weakness during those years, and she doesn’t seek forgiveness or pity. The telling is direct, and though the mechanics of the writing would benefit from some polishing, the story comes through.
The American Dream, with quite a few bumps along the way.Pub Date: March 13, 2006
ISBN: 141207142-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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