An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era...
Reflections on a childhood spent with a feminist, revolution-minded mother.
When Andreas' (International Studies/Brown Univ.; Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, 2013, etc.) mother died, he found hundreds of her journals, written over more than three decades, including when he traveled with her as a young boy throughout South America. Born in Kansas and raised as a Mennonite, Carol Andreas was not a typical 1950s housewife content to play mother to her three sons. She quickly discovered the political activism and feminism movements of the mid-1960s and wanted to be a part of the revolution, wherever it might take place. After leaving his father and living in a commune for a couple of years, mother and son moved to South America, traveling the countryside and living in squalor to be one with the local people. Throughout the book, Andreas impressively re-creates the settings and conversations that took place in Chile and Peru in the early 1970s. The author fully immerses readers in his experiences, which included a lack of discipline or structure to daily life, poverty, and filth (he notes numerous bouts with lice and invasions of mice), and he captures the love felt between mother and son as they worked alongside the poor. Andreas doesn't hide his mother's obsessive nature, shy away from mentioning details of listening to her numerous lovers while he pretended to sleep mere feet from the bed, or dismiss the angst he felt when he thought about his American father, whom he missed very deeply at times. The author also includes details of his infrequent interactions with his older brothers, who were on their own different paths. The overall picture is one of adventure, self-reliance, and intimacy during times of great change, and Andreas offers an informative perspective on what it was like to be a kid through it all.
An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era South America.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2439-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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