An informative read, though not as memorable overall as it might have been. (b&w photos, maps, and glossary)
A well-researched but stylistically flat family memoir.
Kamdar, a policy analyst with the New School in Manhattan, reaches back 100 years to place the Indian half of her family history into the broader contexts of the South Asian diaspora and the decline of India’s rural, clan-based, traditional culture. She starts with “one of the great mysteries of my childhood”: her beloved Motiba (grandmother) had abstract designs tattooed on her chin, cheeks, and forearms, but she never discussed them. After Motiba’s death in the 1990s, Kamdar learned these markings were probably applied for Motiba’s marriage ceremony nearly 80 years earlier, and were thus an emblem of her status as a precious commodity given by her family to her in-laws—a far cry, to her mind, from the tattoos that modern girls wear as personal fashion statements. She then puts this insight aside and launches into stories about her forebears: her great-grandmother’s pet female buffalo, her grandfather’s strict devotion to Gandhi’s moral philosophy (which kept him celibate four years into his marriage to Motiba), her father’s childhood in Rangoon in the 1940s and his later emigration to the US and marriage to the Danish-American farm girl who became her mother. These stories are fun and fascinating, and Kamdar connects them convincingly to larger historical events. But it’s only in later sections—discussing her own childhood as a “foreign” girl in Oregon and California during the 1950s and ’60s, for example—that her prose rises above the merely serviceable and becomes as riveting as her introduction.
An informative read, though not as memorable overall as it might have been. (b&w photos, maps, and glossary)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-891620-58-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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