by Mickey Finn ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2011
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In a tightly constructed, well-paced memoir that sits squarely in the tradition of Dickens and Frank McCourt, Finn recounts the brutal experience of his confinement in Ireland’s Letterfrack Industrial School, an institution for juvenile delinquents.
Mickey Finn is 12 years old and lives in putrid conditions with his ne’re-do-well father, beloved mother and four siblings. His father’s rampant drinking and gambling quickly turn the family into collateral damage, and they find little relief from a grandmother that never approved of her daughter’s marital choice. When Mickey is implicated in a petty theft, he is shipped off to an isolated ward where he and the other incarcerated boys tend livestock, work in the surrounding bogs and endure violent beatings and sexual assault at the hands of the Christian Brothers. Finn’s memoir is often harrowing but can also fatigue the reader with its sometimes one-note despair, simplistic metaphors and moralistic tone. “Again, the scars stayed with me for life as did the scars on my heart.” The author’s insight can become too mired in anger and revulsion. Whereas McCourt and Dickens might find small moments of humor or pathos, Finn never takes those surprising turns. Nor does he choose to delineate the system’s dysfunction, barely touching on the inner workings that doomed him to Letterfrack, much less the role his parents’ shortcomings played as well. Furthermore, the author soft-peddles the instances of sexual misconduct in a way that leaves the reader wondering if he has yet fully confronted his experience. Finn’s story is one of survival—and a compelling one at that—yet he compartmentalizes the experience as one of inevitable darkness wherein its recounting sheds only brief moments of light.
Pub Date: July 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456779993
Page Count: 228
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 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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