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MAY THE SPIRIT BE UNBROKEN

Name: MAY THE SPIRIT BE UNBROKEN
Author: Maxine Louise Michel De Felice
ISBN: 978-1477210772

SEARCH FOR THE MOTHER ROOT

by Maxine Louise Michel De Felice ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2012

An absorbing, if unsettling, survivor’s account, rendered with passion and spirit.

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In this disturbing debut memoir, a “red diaper baby” celebrates surviving a tumultuous upbringing by her Communist, labor-organizing and often absent parents.

Shtarke, a Yiddish word meaning “strong-spirited,” certainly describes De Felice’s late mother, Clara Fiering, an indefatigable labor organizer and advocate for the downtrodden. This episodic book largely focuses on her; the author’s father, Henry Fiering, was cut from the same mold but receives second billing. The author’s parents’ rocky marriage, marked by frequent separations and work that put the interests of the Communist Party and unions first, left De Felice to fend for herself from an early age. In this revealing memoir, she shows how this situation sometimes led to disaster. A monstrous babysitter, for example, regularly left her tied to a chair for hours while she went shopping. One day, when the author was not yet a teenager, a group of boys assaulted her when she was walking home alone from school; when she got home, her mother was busy conducting a political meeting and failed to see her dishevelment. The family also constantly moved wherever the party sent them. Yet amid this trauma, De Felice effectively shows how she deeply loved her parents, who did seem to be committed to her, and how a full complement of relatives and friends added some semblance of stability to her life. Although her parents were avowed atheists, they admonished her to “just remember you’re Jewish,” which provided her with another source of sustenance. However, this memoir lacks a detailed explanation of the parents’ political beliefs, other than the fact that both were Communist Party members until 1953. Did they try to build labor unions so that workers would get fairer wages and better working conditions, or were they committed Marxists striving to create a proletariat that would seize the means of production? The author says that they left the party because “they couldn’t stand the dogma any longer,” but she doesn’t specify what dogma. There are also a few historical inaccuracies, as when the author says that “hundreds died” when cavalry and Army troops attacked unemployed World War I veterans during a 1932 march in Washington, D.C.; most historical accounts put the number at four.

An absorbing, if unsettling, survivor’s account, rendered with passion and spirit.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2012

ISBN: 978-1477210772

Page Count: 300

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Review Posted Online: April 28, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PSYCHOLOGY | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)