A powerful story of a woman’s desperate hopelessness and her long, arduous trek back to herself.
One woman’s memoir of a harrowing 16-year marriage to an ex-convict.
In 1975, former actress Allard worked in a copy center, in the same building that housed The Family, a theater company for former prisoners. She was quite comfortable with this fact, though, due to her long-term experience with the group as a theater manager. However, Allard eventually found herself drawn to a new member who often came in to make copies. Al Black, she writes, was physically formidable, with dark skin and a tall, highly muscular physique—but as she got to know him, she discovered that his personality was also larger-than-life. Black seemed to be reformed, but Allard saw how intense he became when telling violent stories of his past crimes. A big part of her was afraid of what he was capable of, but she was also oddly intrigued; Black was nothing like her milquetoast husband. After she married Black, however, she found out that the caring part of his personality was a facade. He soon plunged her into a dark, horrifying world of drugs, violence, sex and humiliation that she could never have imagined. With perfect clarity, Allard recounts almost two decades of her debilitating—nearly fatal—marriage, as she watched the man she loved spiral into a drug-induced, manic and often violent haze. She writes of how he forced her to visit sex clubs and watch him have relations with strange women in their own home. Allard fell into despair so deep that she couldn’t imagine ever seeing the light again (“I knew I was in a dark well, one that I could not climb out of”). She eventually realized that she had to face all of her demons in order to truly heal. In this intense memoir, she shows how she managed to navigate the rocky road to her recovery.
A powerful story of a woman’s desperate hopelessness and her long, arduous trek back to herself.Pub Date: March 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494401214
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
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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