In Rozelle’s loving memoir of his late father, a longtime Texas school superintendent, we glimpse a dimly lit picture of an aging man whose character never quite emerges. The author, himself a high-school English teacher in the Houston area, alternates reminiscences of his youth with entries from 1991—92, when his father, Lester, began at age 85 “to slip a bit,” experiencing “short moments of confusion, the hesitation before taking a step.” Poignant scenes show Lester getting lost in the house; forgetting that his wife was not at the store, but instead out of town; and even failing to recognize his son: “I have a son who teaches school,” Lester informs Ron. —Now, tell me again . . . Who are you?” Sad but, in an 85-year- old, not tragic . And the author goes on to draw a shaky portrait of his father’s life in happier years. Flashing back to the1960s, when Lester faced the challenge posed by integration to his school system, Rozelle says little about his father’s actual stance. Ditto Rozelle-the-elder’s stint as a political appointee under President Johnson and even when teaching at a prison. We do learn that the purchase of a fishing cottage (although he did not fish) and a car trip to Florida “were exceptions to an otherwise predictable life.” More vivid is the evocation of Rozelle’s chain-smoking, ailing mother who, stoked with too many medicines, would ultimately shoot herself to death. And a powerful scene of youthful racism has the young Rozelle denying his black playmates to a group of taunting boys: “They ain’t my friends,” he insists. Even a slight memoir has its moments. But the real story seems to lie buried somewhere below the surface of the author’s recollections of good times with his mother and under Rozelle’s reflections on his changing East Texas neighborhood.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-17711-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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