Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to...
A recollection of the people, the sights, sounds, smells—the feel—of a boyhood in a harsh and splendid time in America.
Hynes (The Soldiers’ Tale, 1997, etc.), now a near-80 professor emeritus (Literature/Princeton), was motherless at five. He grew up in various places until his father settled in Minneapolis and married again. The Great Depression, seemingly permanent, was at its nadir. It was a time when folks made do or did without. It was a hard time and, in many ways, a happy time, too. Kids might easily get into trouble, but not into danger. Many people never bothered to lock their cars or front doors. Each night, though, Sam’s father ritually latched his door. He was independent, striving, and never quite making it, married to a decent, frugal, hardworking stepmother to his two boys. As his son recalls him, his father was gentle and good. Trust the author’s memory. He remembers the seasons: the halcyon summer on a farm, culminating by a view of a stallion servicing a mare (“something heroic . . . like a parade or a brass band”), and the Minnesota winter, with laundry frozen on the line and snow that made distance evaporate. With him we play cops and robbers again (the little kids are the cops), listen to radio serials, graduate finally to long pants and discover jazz. We edit the high-school newspaper, take Manual Training, and encounter, fumbling, the opposite sex. The tale closes, not ends, as the nearly grown-up boy enters WWII. It is nothing really extraordinary, nothing uncommon; it’s just a story told with uncommon narrative skill. Past tense frequently gives way to present tense, present again in those youthful days now long past. It’s a work evocative for those who remember just which war was The War and instructive to everyone else. The trip to the author’s bountiful root cellar of memory is augmented with snapshots and clippings.
Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to be.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03193-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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