Gilberg delivers a debut memoir about coming-of-age in 1950s Ohio.
The author serves as a guide to the seemingly quintessential Midwestern town of New Bremen. He shows readers a time and place in which everyone seemed to know their neighbors, from the doctors who made house calls to the farmers who needed extra help in hay season. Hardwood trees stood in abundance, so that “riding a bicycle down most of the town’s streets was like going through quiet, leafy, shady, green tunnels.” Of course, it was also a time of Cold War paranoia and fear of a polio epidemic. Gilberg also offers up a firsthand account of a time of change for young people, with rock ’n’ roll making its assault on school dances and car enthusiasts pursuing their passion for customization. It’s this latter aspect that gives the book its title and takes up a great deal of its narrative focus. Specifically, the author tells of how he helped to found an automotive club called the Road Rebels (“New Bremen was going to have a car club! Just because”) and shares their many adventures as well as his undying enthusiasm for engines. The book is most intriguing when it includes the sorts of details and anecdotes that less personal histories often overlook, such as the fact that the official Road Rebel shirt had “Safety Club” embroidered on the left sleeve or how the author earnestly participated in the retrospectively silly Civilian Air Patrol Ground Observer Corps. The book isn’t all Leave It to Beaver moments, though; death comes to New Bremen in horrific ways, and the author realizes that he eventually must move on to bigger and better things. Some of Gilberg’s reflections, such as an account of him and his friends playing with carbide cannons, don’t offer as much excitement as others do. They do, however, help to create a more complete picture of what it was like to be alive in those bygone days. A highly personal and readable remembrance that paints an appealing picture of the past.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5724-6
Page Count: 266
Publisher: True Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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