Despite occasional choppy patches, a spirited memoir deeply committed to personal self-worth.
Snappy, jazzy memoir of a Dominican upbringing by a New York journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Despite efforts since the election of the first black president to assume race no longer matters in America, Cepeda (editor: And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, 2004) asserts that constructing one’s identity requires expressing and celebrating its makeup. Cepeda’s parents hailed from Paradise, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Their relationship was an oil-and-water whirlwind romance between a handsome singer and a 16-year-old child bride whose move to Upper Manhattan quickly soured on pecuniary exigencies and pregnancy. Cepeda lived first with her mother, who cleaned houses and held many jobs at once, through new boyfriends, relocation to San Francisco and more children, then with her father, now remarried to a white woman, back in New York. In this Dominican barrio, Cepeda spent her formative years attending Catholic school and being told she was “ass backward,” mastering street slang and class hierarchy, and enduring the grueling tennis lessons her father forced her to take. He also frequently compared her in a derogatory fashion to her mother as the worst of the Dominican lot. Love for her Dominican boyfriend and his family and shame assimilated in school created a conflicted sense of identity that often came out in fights; she identified with black culture, finding in hip-hop ideal expressions of her feelings. Later, in adulthood, with her daughter now in high school and her father recovering from heart surgery, Cepeda yearned to make peace with her conflicted selves and convinced him and other relatives to submit to DNA testing. Further revelations prompted trips to far-flung locations and compelled all of them to reconcile with deep-seated stereotypes of identity.
Despite occasional choppy patches, a spirited memoir deeply committed to personal self-worth.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451635867
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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