An affecting and well-written, if uneven, memoir of life in the holler. Warren locates her earliest memories in Depression-era Kentucky, where her father worked the coal mines and her mother struggled to raise 13 children. Warren evokes that world with a keen sense of detail: “Thick clouds of coal dust blown from [the] blasting inferno hung in the air picked up an air current and floated off to settle on every leaf of every tree and bush it could reach,” she writes of the setting. She is not always successful when she relates the details of her own life, for Warren seems strangely reluctant to place herself at center stage, and the distance is sometimes unsettling. When her gaze is elsewhere than on herself, however, Warren writes confidently and interestingly, telling tales of itinerant, guitar-strumming evangelists, scruffy dogs and their scruffy owners, and oddball neighbors. (One, a midwife, was held to be trustworthy because she could read and write, even though, Warren notes, “Father knew a man who carried spectacles around in his shirt pocket without knowing one word from another.”) Eventually driven from the Kentucky backwoods by poverty and encroaching mining and big-timber interests, her family relocated to Wyoming, where, Warren writes, people talked loudly (because, her mother explains, the wind blows all the time and they have to make themselves heard above it) and asked them rude questions about their background. Warren relates that she then endured years of shame about her hillbilly past before, married to a New Yorker, she decided to return home and embrace her past. The close of her memoir, however, is a particularly telling example of the adage that you can’t go home again. Readers of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands will find much of value in Warren’s life story.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-89733-464-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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