by Sharon Ann ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Beautifully wrought memoir of a modest American dream morphing into a terrible nightmare.
A woman looks back on her dysfunctional family life growing up in New Jersey and abroad.
As much a profile of her disturbed mother as a memoir of the author’s youth, Ann’s crisp, assured memoir presents a depressing landscape inhabited by damaged people. The story begins in 2004 with the author driving from Alaska to the Appalachians to visit her aged mother. “Can…you…forgive…me?” her mother asks—an ominous foreshadowing of what’s to come. The story then flashes back to the 1950s, with the author the youngest child of an Italian-American factory worker and an Irish woman he’d met in England at the end of World War II. Ann was a daddy’s girl but feared early on that her depressed mother, Eileen, didn’t love her family. After divorcing Ann’s passive father, Eileen tried to turn their kids against him. Spiraling down to shabby neighborhoods and taverns, she married an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, and the family’s fortunes improved even if their home life didn’t. Eileen—“an alcoholic Irish floozy with a passel of half-grown brats”—tried to fit into middle-class suburban life by hiding her kids in the basement, belittling them to strangers, and converting to Protestantism. Equally unsuccessful at assimilating, Ann moved with the family to the Azores and Okinawa, becoming even more of an outsider and eventually being institutionalized back in New Jersey. The book ends decades later with Ann as a grown woman in Alaska, reflecting on the deaths of her mother and her middle-aged sister, who had tried to live up to their mother’s impossible standards. The clear, sometimes darkly humorous, and often beautiful writing runs counterpoint to the craziness and ugliness of the life Ann describes. She delivers a powerfully sad story, at times dwelling a bit too much on the quotidian activities of childhood, such as playing doctor with a young neighbor boy. But the tales of this broken family ring true and resonate in the personal details the author reveals. All the characters are lifelike and believable in their human imperfections. Especially convincing is the finely wrought portrait of a mother who seems to hate her life and, often, even her children.
Beautifully wrought memoir of a modest American dream morphing into a terrible nightmare.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-105-99335-0
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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