by Mark Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2001
Phillips’s rebirth is a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system.
A hard-bitten, working-class childhood on the fringes of decaying Buffalo, New York, goes a long way toward rendering freelancer Phillips’s memoir into a plaint, an extended ache that finds its way right into the reader’s heart.
Like a good train wreck, this family history has a way of holding your attention despite the pain and sorrow. Buffalo had aged badly by the time Phillips was born into the shadow of the cruddy industrial city in the 1950s. His father was an enormous presence, albeit a mostly absent one as he poured on the overtime at the power plant, breathing in the coal dust as he spot-welded the rickety equipment, pushing to make every possible dollar, then to return home to collapse before the television, with a beer and a butt. He was exhausted and tetchy, a combination monster and guardian angel, who endured “boring dangerous filthy sweaty deafening work” in hopes of saving enough money to buy a piece of land in the Alleghenies: to hunt and fish, to commune with his son. The father’s dream isn’t shared by the family, and it is not a happy life, though not a grossly unhappy one. But it gets no better for the young Phillips when he develops Tourette’s syndrome. Teased at home and at school for his garden of tics and weird talk, he becomes withdrawn and violent, anonymously disruptive at school, all the while fiercely trying to control his behavior. His writing echoes that emotional stifling: blanched and hollow-eyed, eerie and foreboding and breathtaking, it’s close to a heart monitor’s flat line. Then, in a terrible saving grace, as his father dies a long death to cancer, the cabin is built, father and son tangle their heartstrings, the “coal-black and electric-bright American dream” becomes fate and fatality, and Phillips goes on to a better life by far, a life in that very same cabin.
Phillips’s rebirth is a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58574-391-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
Share your opinion of this book
by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by Helen Fremont
BOOK REVIEW
by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
More by Laura Schroff
BOOK REVIEW
by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.