A radiant and insightful collection of personal essays which meditate upon the importance of place in the development of character. Fullilove (a professor of psychiatry and public health at Columbia Univ.) is interested in exploring a psychology of place. Beginning from geographer Anssi Paasi’s notion of place as the personal assimilation of location and event, she wishes to understand the dynamics of the situations we find ourselves in at various stages of our lives. Each of her essays is an exploration of how close friends and members of her family have been affected by their physical surroundings—in both nurturing and disruptive manners. The essays range from her father’s realization of the importance of regrouping his base of political power in the black ghetto of Orange, N.J. (after his fall from the national labor union movement during the era of the McCarthy hearings), to the sense of desolation she experienced when the home of her close childhood friend was razed to make way for a new East-West Freeway. In another essay she tries to unravel how important a sense of belonging to a certain place was to her four children—three of whom experienced the psychic dislocation of being placed in foster homes before coming to live with her. The voice of her essays remains consistently gentle and understanding, even when she is describing her own personal pain at being made to leave her favorite school as a child to serve as a sacrifice in the school integration movement. In keeping with the spirit of the collection, she often draws upon examples from children’s literature to support her themes; she quotes liberally from such sources as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Boxcar Children, and Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. The overall effect here can only be described as motherly. A literary antidote to the displacement and upheaval of modern life as we go crashing headlong into the new millennium.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8032-2007-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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