Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming...
A nonfiction-writing professor muses on the random occurrences that led to his parents’ troubled marriage and its subsequent effects on his own trajectory.
Root (Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves, 2013, etc.) ambles along a winding road that begins with the unlikely romance between his mother, Marie, a vivacious young woman focused on marriage and movie stars, and his father, Bob, a quiet, industrious man. A mere two months after the marriage, Bob entered the Marine Corps to fight in World War II, an event that changed the Root family forever. Despite her devout Catholic heritage, Marie, feeling lonely and abandoned, had an affair that resulted in pregnancy; although this infidelity fractured the fledgling marriage, Bob agreed to raise another man’s daughter as his own. Marie favored the girl over her two sons with Bob, and the author grew up feeling alienated from both his parents, spending most of his time reading alone in his room. Over the next several years, his parents divorced, remarried and then divorced again, their tenuous yet stubborn bond remaining constant. After Marie’s death at age 48, the author, now married and studying for a doctorate in English, learned that his mother had engaged in financial deception in addition to adultery. Root’s plainspoken honesty is striking: “I also knew that, even in that moment when I was still in the throes of my own grief and my own sense of loss, I would not forgive my mother for this betrayal.” Further segments address Root’s own divorce and remarriage and the ways that we alternately repeat and reject our parents’ choices.
Although the narrative is occasionally meandering and stolid, the best sections address the difficulties inherent in coming to terms with parental imperfections.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-191-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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