A detailed record of one boy’s difficult journey to adulthood, which may interest aficionados of northern Minnesota life.
This debut memoir offers a boy’s adventures in northern Minnesota from the wake of the Great Depression to the aftermath of World War II.
Slayback describes a hardscrabble childhood on the Minnesota Iron Range, on his way to eventual success as a lawyer in California. He competently narrates clear, brief recollections of important events, including his mother dying in a truck accident in 1939 and being scalded by a kettle and surviving a rooster attack as a boy. He also writes about his stay in a Duluth orphanage at age 9 and a brief adventure when he ran away to Minneapolis at 14, among other tales. Plainspoken, with an eye for significant historical detail, the author does a fine job describing the trials of youth, relating a time when beer cost five cents and a movie 15 cents, and wartime ration books determined what commodities a family could buy. The author’s almost incantatory naming of towns—Moose Lake, Sturgeon Lake, Finland, Twin Harbors, Duluth—bespeaks his yearning for “the only place I’d ever call home.” Regrettably, the author’s keen attention to detail is not matched by an ability to extract larger meaning, and his efforts to do so often feel forced: “Home is a place of roots, a place of identity, a place of belonging; a place that fosters values, manners, gives encouragement and love; a place where you can recharge your battery, receive guidance, understanding, and get straight answers on how to survive in the world.” Nonetheless, the author’s attention to history—from the xenophobia of small towns, in which only those of Finnish or Scandinavian descent were allowed to teach school, to details on the construction of Viking ships or the social significance of newsboys—makes this a useful primary document for historians.
A detailed record of one boy’s difficult journey to adulthood, which may interest aficionados of northern Minnesota life.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479302420
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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