A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.
A moving but frank account of the last year of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life, by her daughter, that poignantly details an often difficult relationship between a loving parent and her now-adult child.
Like all journals, this is as much a record of emotions as events. Lindbergh (Under a Wing, 1998, etc.) begins with the summer of 1999 when it was apparent that 93-year-old Anne Morrow Lindbergh, ill with pneumonia, was too frail to live in her own home in Connecticut, and needed to move to her cottage on her daughter’s Vermont farm. Around-the-clock caregivers keep her comfortable and relieve the author of much of the physical burden, but she still must contend with the slow dying of all that her mother was, and meant, an emotional weight almost as wearing in its reality and its implications. Her mother, whose great gift was her ability to use language, now seldom spoke. She read a great deal, often seemed restless, and talked of wanting to go home, but could not define, after a lifetime of living in many places, what particular home she meant. The author notes the guilt all children feel as their parents age, not because, “we have not done our best for them but because we have. We cannot keep them alive . . . there is nothing we can do about it.” As she records her reactions and her mother’s continuing decline, she also recalls her childhood, her famous father, and her relations with her siblings and her own children. But at the heart of her journal is the relationship with her mother, who so comforted her when her first son died young, and who shared her delight in writing. Despite her failing health and her retreat into almost total silence, Anne Morrow lingered until February of this year.
A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0313-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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