by Richard Shelton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2016
A quietly profound memoir “of a family and how it got that way.”
An award-winning writer tells the story of his family by exploring the lives of three remarkable female relatives through three generations.
Shelton (Emeritus, English/Univ. of Arizona; Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer, 2007, etc.) reflects on a childhood and adolescence spent “hover[ing] precariously between the middle and lower classes.” Rather than offer a chronology of events in his family life, the author interweaves his life reflections with stories about his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, who all kept the journals Shelton uses to construct his larger narrative. He begins with his great-grandmother Josephine. A Midwestern beauty who married a jack-of-all-trades husband with a penchant for writing poetry, Josie was a hardscrabble Kansas homesteader in the late 1800s. “For Josie,” writes Shelton, “there is no yellow brick road and no wizard,” only grueling labor and an early death. Her daughter, Charlotte, settled in Idaho, raised four children, and survived two difficult marriages, a scandalous affair, and several live-in lovers before marrying a man nearly a decade her junior. This free-spirited woman offended Shelton’s mother, Hazel, who wanted “genteel respectability above all else.” Yet Hazel’s own marriage to the charming, alcoholic Red was far from a middle-class fairy tale. Despite having been raised in a rich farming community where many of his relatives had been wealthy landowners, Red was a poor man who made his living as a bootlegger during the Depression and then as a house painter later on. Emotionally distant from Shelton, Red routinely had affairs with other women, which Hazel tried to avenge by shooting up a bar Red frequented with his girlfriends. Only when Shelton, who became the first in his family to go to college, became Red’s caretaker during his final illness did the rifts in their own relationship begin to heal. In this richly textured book, the author creates a memorable family portrait and reveals the way patterns of living within families shape expectations and reality.
A quietly profound memoir “of a family and how it got that way.”Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8165-3400-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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