An unsentimental memoir of being an American in English boarding schools—the first nonfiction from the author of The Promise of Light (1993), etc. Watkins registers his shock as a small boy upon being left by his father at the Dragon School near Oxford. A dreamy child, he learns to endure a sadistic teacher's beatings and the special ways the English have of dealing with such intruders as ``Our New Friend from the Colonies.'' Watkins shows how quickly children can accept extreme conditions and get on with the concerns of childhood, from pillow fights to G.I. Joes, and once, blissfully, an outing in a small airplane with his visiting father. But home in Rhode Island on vacations, he doesn't fit in anymore: ``From now on I would be intruding in both places,'' he remarks, and writing stories begins to make him feel less lonely, ``free to travel across the centuries, in and out of people's hearts and minds.'' Soon after Watkins moves up to Eton, his father dies of cancer. His father, a Welshman, had also gone to the Dragon School but had always felt inferior to Etonians, and Watkins here depicts an Eton in love with itself and its history; forced to be a good little soldier in school, he identifies with the Eton fallen of WW I and II, and the historical novels begin to take shape. His more personal experience of school, however, is explored less deeply than one could wish— his regret at not having made more friends at Eton, his motives for reporting two boys he found in bed together, his reaction to a classmate's suicide. A graceful and ultimately sad account that tends to keep to the surface but, even so, makes us question assumptions about education, tradition, and the elite.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42056-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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