A sad but fitting memorial to Bellil, who died of stomach cancer at age 31 in 2004.
Disturbing account of the author’s adolescence in Seine-Saint-Denis, a Parisian suburb crowded with low-rent high-rises and misguided youth.
Her parents, immigrants from Algiers, were critical and violent, often punishing Bellil by throwing her into the streets despite the dangers they knew lurked there. Neglected and rebellious, she was only 13 when she fell in with a neighborhood gang, 14 when they gang-raped her. Steeped in misguided traditions and worried about their reputations, her family and friends abandoned her and even blamed her for the rape. When she finally found the courage to break the neighborhood code of silence and file charges, the police and lawyers assigned to the case were indifferent and lazy, further instilling in Bellil a sense of bitter hopelessness. In gritty, vivid language, the author describes the rage she felt at facing her situation alone, the numbing relief of drugs, her increasing inability to keep mind and body whole. “[Acting out] was the only means I had,” she writes, “to vomit up the suffering that suffocated and devoured me so physically it was as if I were being eaten up by worms.” She suffered epileptic seizures, spent years in shelters, hospitals and the streets; her home was filled with tension, blame and alcohol-fueled altercations with her parents. Bellil often dreamed of the idyllic time she’d spent with a Belgian foster family while her father was in prison, and memories of that unconditional love kept her working toward a new life. She eventually found help in psychotherapy and wrote this memoir as part of her emotional recovery. Its publication in 2002 put the author at the forefront of a movement to force French officials to acknowledge and address the overlooked violence against young women in its squalid banlieues.
A sad but fitting memorial to Bellil, who died of stomach cancer at age 31 in 2004.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1356-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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