A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.
A sad, sanguinary, and clumsy account of life and death among Chicago’s Puerto Rican street gangs.
Sanchez uses a pen name in this horrifying memoir to protect others, he claims, but since he admits to multiple felonies, including murder (no statute of limitations), it’s obviously for self-protection as well. Sanchez wishes to “provide some explanations for why kids join gangs” and hopes his efforts “can save the life of at least one kid.” He was born in Puerto Rico into an abusive home; his 74-year-old father did not last long, and his 16-year-old mother lived with a succession of monstrous men. Raped as a child by a male relative, Sanchez found life only worse after the “family” moved to Chicago when he was seven. His mother married Pedro (“fat, toothless, stinky, and loud”), and soon the boy was receiving regular beatings from both parents. As he grew older, he drifted into street life, had his initial sexual experience at 13 with a 35-year-old, began using drugs, and before long adopted the street code: “You have to learn to hurt people before they have a chance to hurt you.” Throughout, Sanchez relates events in remarkable detail, recalling names, dates, locations, and dialogue with a felicity that belies his repeated statements that he was high most of the time. (Was he keeping a diary?) The artless prose is rife with clichés (things hit him “like a ton of bricks”), usage errors (“between him and I” is a favorite locution), and inaccurate allusions (he thinks Frankenstein is the creature, not the creator). Far more serious than these stylistic flaws is the author’s failure to substantively reflect on his experience. His observations range from patent to ludicrous—after raping a girl, he concludes, “It seemed as if I was becoming coldhearted”—and he closes with the perfunctory advice that we must “take responsibility for our own neighborhoods.”
A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55652-401-3
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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