Courageous and emotionally intense.
The follow-up to Calcaterra’s bestselling Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island (2013).
In her second book, the author teams up with her youngest sister, Maloney, to tell the story of their alcoholic and psychologically damaged mother, Cookie. Their two older sisters managed to leave the family through marriage or moving in with friends; Calcaterra sought legal emancipation at age 14. However, because Maloney and her brother, Norm, were still young children, they were forced to stay with Cookie, who “only wanted [them] for the welfare checks.” When she was “too busy” drinking and carousing to look after Maloney and her brother, the pair went into a foster care home, where they were abused. Cookie eventually kidnapped her children and took them to live with an assortment of men she picked up in bars or on the street. To escape legal problems and being “put in the slammer,” Cookie and her children left for Idaho. There they stayed with friends until Cookie was caught stealing from her hosts. Life only began to stabilize for Maloney and Norm after Cookie finally settled down with Clyde, the Mormon husband of another woman. As Maloney entered adolescence, she endured unwanted sexual advances from Clyde, more beatings from her mother, and virtual enslavement as a worker on the farm where they lived. School and the hope of reunion with her sisters, who did whatever they could to help, saved Maloney from a temporary slide into alcohol and drugs and occasional thoughts of suicide. In the end, she not only broke free of Cookie, but also found the happiness that had eluded her throughout her youth. As engrossing as Etched in Sand, this book is a testament to Maloney’s remarkable resilience and a moving tribute to the unbreakable bond of love she shared with her siblings.
Courageous and emotionally intense.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241258-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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