A prolific Chicagoan journalist climbs his family tree.
Having previously written about the Windy City’s two most notorious serial killers and its 19th-century police-corruption scandal, Lindberg (The Gambler King of Clark Street, 2009, etc.) turns inward with a bittersweet labor of love he asserts was many years in the making. The Swedish American author was born in Chicago in the 1960s, “at the height of the McCarthy-era hysteria,” and was raised by his stern, “paradoxical” father Oscar, who followed (and instilled in his son) extremist socialist principles. Lindberg draws readers into his family lineage with an engaging combination of historical specifics and anecdotal memories springing from the mass exodus of Swedes from their native land. Many, including his own parents and grandparents, fled an impoverished life in rural Sweden for the shores of America in search of peace and prosperity. But this is very much Oscar’s story. As Lindberg methodically traces the genesis of his Swedish family, the memoir’s focus remains on his father, who “slipped past” Canadian customs officials in 1924 to settle in Chicago’s North Side “Swedetown,” a favored immigrant destination. Through letters and the author’s remarkably sturdy memory, he illustrates the despair of his father’s life: the crushing death of his mother, the turmoil of four rocky marriages and the halfhearted attempts to be a good father to his children while battling alcoholism. Yet the cultivation of Oscar’s hardworking livelihood as a postwar master homebuilder reveals a redeeming inner strength and nobility. Woven throughout Lindberg’s exhaustive narration are palpable threads of sadness and anger aimed at a father who lacked compassion and affection, stunting the development of a son whose childhood needs went unmet. Only in the final pages, when the author writes of attending an emotionally healing class reunion, is a moving moment of catharsis achieved. Deep, introspective and somber, this is by far Lindberg’s most personal book to date.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4684-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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