Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.
Award-winning author Denton (American Massacre, 2003, etc.), who’s written widely on the American West, tells the story of her great-great-grandmother, a Mormon pioneer.
A well-heeled Victorian Englishwoman, Jean Rio Griffiths found herself dissatisfied with the staid ways of the Church of England. When in 1848 Jean Rio and her husband met Mormon missionary John Taylor, they were captivated by his message, and in 1849 they were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Just months later, Jean Rio’s husband died, and in 1851 the widow took her seven children to America to join the Mormons in Utah. Jean Rio was ultimately disappointed by the church—she loathed polygamy, she was horrified by the 1857 massacre, when Mormons slaughtered a train-full of “Gentile” pioneers, and she couldn’t tolerate the Mormons’ acceptance of widespread poverty. Eventually, she left and moved to California. The strength of Denton’s biography lies in her eye for detail: for example, in the description of Jean Rio’s grand piano, the first to make it by wagon to the intermountain West, or the mention of the ox that died because he ingested Indian war paint. The book is filled with riveting vignettes, like the stories of Jean Rio’s mother’s escape as a baby from Revolutionary France to Scotland and of Jean Rio’s daughter-in-law’s migration from Denmark to Utah. Denton, however, fails to establish herself as an entirely trustworthy narrator. Granted, impartial writing about Mormonism is rare. But while the tale here isn’t wildly sensationalistic, neither is it entirely evenhanded. Denton speaks of Jean Rio’s being “seduced” by the story the missionaries told. She leans heavily on Fawn Brodie’s biased biography of Joseph Smith but doesn’t cite standard academic histories like Jan Shipps’s Mormonism. The ending—celebrating the “tolerance” and “hope for a community of faith irrespective of creed” that, in Denton’s view, Jean Rio espoused by the end of her life—is anodyne.
Jean Rio’s is an interesting life, but Denton’s fourth outing disappoints.Pub Date: April 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4135-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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