by Natalia Rachel Singer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2004
A palatable history lesson, by turns funny, stern, and often sad.
The charmingly personal becomes the mightily political in a muscular, well-wrought series of essays that move chronologically through an appalling decade of public and private self-indulgence.
Singer (English/St. Lawrence Univ.) was 22 in 1980 and “ready to let the transcendence begin” when this brand-new Northwestern graduate moved to Seattle with boyfriend Joe. Her plan was to get laid off and become an “evolved human,” except that Ronald Reagan was about to be elected, ushering in a war on big government and a “crisis of faith in Team America.” Singer’s younger self, the first-person protagonist of these essays, worked hand to mouth in restaurants, at an emerging HMO dubbed Group Death, and in an under-the-table hippie sweat shop assembling jewelry boxes, observing with cunning eyes the unfolding of the decade’s horrors. “Voodoo economics” (a phrase coined by the elder George Bush), which accompanied Reagan’s huge escalation in the Pentagon budget with drastic under-funding of social services, to the author meant cutbacks in the mental-health care required by her unstable and increasingly dangerous mother back in Cleveland. Singer nails the advent of televangelists and other desperate religious strivings with her account of a visit to Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s holy state outside of Antelope, Oregon, in the essay “Shelter.” She chronicles her newly yuppie friends’ transformation into Ollie North clones and her own resemblance to “scary babe” Fawn Hall. The crises of AIDS, Chernobyl, and the Challenger explosion are all couched within Singer’s own personal toils: heartbreaks, abortions, head wounds from a bicycle accident. “How I Survived the Crash” finds a metaphor for the country’s lack of “structural integrity” in an account of shopping for a bra with her mother in Northampton, Massachusetts. Singer has certainly done her homework for this entertaining refresher course on the decade of big hair and small mercies: the acknowledgments alone offer an excellent bibliography of an era that many readers who lived through it would rather forget.
A palatable history lesson, by turns funny, stern, and often sad.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-8032-4309-X
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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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