by Megan Hustad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2014
Some tediously detailed sections and an impressionistic structure weaken the overall impact of Hustad’s memoir.
A daughter of evangelical missionaries reflects on the complexities of faith.
Hustad (How to be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work, 2008) was born in Minneapolis, where her family had relatives and roots. But her parents felt a religious calling, and soon, young Megan and her sister, Amy, were transported to the Caribbean island of Bonaire, where her father took a post with Trans World Radio, broadcasting God’s word over shortwave. Bonaire, flat and salt-rich, “offered excellent conductivity for radio signals,” heard as far north as Canada and south to the Amazon. After a few years on the buggy, soggy island, the family returned to Minnesota, awaiting a new assignment: this time, to Holland. When Megan protested that she didn’t want to live in a foreign country, her mother replied, “That’s too bad….Because you live in one now.” Alienated from 1980s American culture, Hustad’s parents felt out of place in Holland, as well, where the supervisor of TWR was intent on making Christian views relevant in “the marketplace of ideas.” Maybe phone-in programs would help; maybe market research: “[B]ad programming,” he insisted, “placed a strain upon the sovereignty of God.” When her father’s conflict with the supervisor proved unresolvable, the family was offered another post in Sri Lanka. Instead, they returned to Minnesota. Amy, 18, had long before rejected her family’s life of near poverty and cultural isolation. Megan, 12, still went weekly to the church youth group “because I was not prepared not to. I was initially expected to be better at God but everyone quickly realized that I was not.” Escaping to New York City as soon as she could, Megan met people “who associated religious belief with rank stupidity” and even pathology, leading her to reconsider her own complicated connections to faith.
Some tediously detailed sections and an impressionistic structure weaken the overall impact of Hustad’s memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-29883-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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