A pleasant reflection on mostly good times.
A breezy memoir about growing up in the 1940s and ’50s along the California coast.
This isn’t Archibald’s (Accidental Cowgirl, 2007, etc.) first memoir, but the focus here is on her early years—from her birth in 1938 in the small town of Soquel, California, until the early ’60s, when she was in her 20s and living on her own. She writes that, as a child, she knew how to make the most out of the adoration she received from loving parents and grandparents: “Besides being winsome, I was terribly spoiled, the center of attention in my family....I soon discovered that my wish was their command, and I was the Great Manipulator.” The family lived for two years in Dayton, Ohio, during World War II, while her father was in the Navy; there, the author discovered a passion for the stage that would eventually lead her to join a part-time traveling chorus line while she was still in high school. After the war, the family returned to California, first to the Berkeley suburbs and then to the Walnut Creek suburbs. Eventually, she was a single woman living in San Francisco, navigating what she characterizes as a tricky path between being attractive to the opposite sex and maintaining a well-honed sense of propriety. The author presents her lighthearted recollections in a series of vignettes that paint a vivid portrait of small-town life as America weathered the end of the Great Depression and wartime. Archibald shares little moments that create lasting images; for example, she describes her mother applying leg makeup when nylon stockings were hard to come by: “She’d sit at her dressing table, hold one shapely leg aloft by the ankle, and starting there, guiding the pencil with her thumb and index finger, she’d draw a thin line all the way up the back of her leg, and then I’d get to check it carefully to make sure her ‘seams’ were straight.” However, readers should be prepared for some chronological confusion, as Archibald’s story tends to go wherever her memories take her at any given moment.
A pleasant reflection on mostly good times.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cloud Lake Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
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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