And would she ever make them proud in these pages. Emotionally luxurious and heart-gladdening. (22 photos)
Novelist/essayist Volk (White Light, not reviewed) pens a stylishly written memoir that’s really a series of portraits of the memorable characters who make up her extended family.
It’s a simple approach, if you can pull it off: one beguiling vignette after another, and a good number of welcome reprises. Volk’s classy prose, as smooth on its wheels as a Bentley, makes it work like a wonder. Hers is a Jewish, New York City restaurant family whose members conducted a high-octane love affair with one another—well, all except for Aunt Lil, who “went through life thinking she got the small half.” There are the distant relatives who glitter like stars in the family firmament: the paternal great-grandfather who brought pastrami to New York City in 1888, the aunt who sported the “Best Legs in Atlantic City” in 1916. There’s the woman who worked for them: “It was a bizarre New York Jewish sensibility that we could somehow protect Millie from prejudice by never acknowledging there was such a thing as color.” But mostly there is the benign despot of a father, a godhead, a man who inspires such love in Volk that it aches; the glamorous mother who cooked only one dinner Volk can remember (it tasted like licorice roast); and the sister with whom she fought sibling trench warfare, who has incontrovertible proof that her bones are big (she had them measured by electrodes) and who packs the kind of worldly wisdom that sets reality squarely in sight: “I know every diet. Here’s the trick, okay? Here’s all you have to know: Eat less.” Volk’s conclusion? “They were mine, I was lucky to have them.”
And would she ever make them proud in these pages. Emotionally luxurious and heart-gladdening. (22 photos)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41106-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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