Those tired of the reductive view of autobiography as voyeur’s toy will welcome these investigations on the form’s redemptive powers and link to history. In her collection, memoirist Hampl (English/Univ. of Minnesota; Virgin Time, 1992, etc.) offers as subjects a range of autobiographical writers, including Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Czeslaw Milosz, Edith Stein, Anne Frank, and St. Augustine. She links them through her introductory essays, in which she plumbs the importance of memoir, which provides readers with “the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately” and offers writers the chance “to find not only a self but a world,” a world they discover by telling “their mind, not their story.” In discussing her subjects” minds, Hampl reveals her own: She is a poet, a pilgrim, someone old enough to have loved a Vietnam draft resister and have lost friends, whose memory she appropriates for her writing. Like many essayists, she is more memorable for her epigrammatic observations than her arguments. Readers need not accept Hampl’s analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or of her own life to allow her belief in “the primacy of the first-person voice in American imaginative writing.” Disagree with her easy contention that “Religion is typically too constrained by the systems and institutions that claim it,” but accept that “To write one’s life is to live it twice.” For, as she says of St. Augustine’s Confessions, what matters is the mind at work: “Consciousness, not experience, is the galvanizing core of a personal story.” Dogged and various in her explorations on memoir, she gives weight to her belief in the intellectual need in our culture to become ’sophisticated about the function of memory.”
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04738-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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