Forty years of an adventurous and loving marriage, recounted alternately by husband and wife, who occasionally seem to have lived on different planes but never lost touch. Both Haizlips are African-Americans. Shirlee is the author of The Sweeter the Juice (1994), a well-received account of her search for the light-skinned relatives of her mother’s family, who chose to pass for white in the Jim Crow days. Although Harold and Shirlee’s memoir touches on experiences of racism, it is really a story of passion and commitment that begins with the couple’s first meeting (on a blind date). At that time, Shirlee (the daughter of a prominent Connecticut minister) was a junior at Wellesley College, and Harold (the son of a Washington railway porter and a cleaning woman) was a graduate student in Classics at Harvard. Since Shirlee’s father had two strictures’she had to finish college and could not be pregnant at the wedding—they waited for Shirlee’s graduation before marrying. Ambitious and idealistic, the young couple was driven by Harold’s career as an educator and first made their home in Boston. Later they moved to New York, where life included lots of glamorous parties—at which they were frequently the only (and, they eventually realized, the token) black couple. They next settled on the island of St. Thomas, where Harold spent a decade rebuilding the school system. Politics threw them out of St. Thomas and into dark times, but they survived and revived, finally in California, where they live today. Two daughters (one a Yale graduate, one a Yale dropout) have been successful. Overall, Shirlee’s account is personal and intimate, while Harold’s focuses more on political and cultural affairs Is there a lesson here? Yes, probably. Once committed to your life partner, hang on, cultivate love and respect, remember where you came from, and celebrate when you can . . . black or white. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1998
ISBN: 1-56836-254-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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