One woman's attempt to comprehend and ultimately learn to live with the fact of her mother's suicide. When Hammer was nine years old, her mother killed herself, carefully planning the act to protect her daughter from possible physical harm; what she could not protect her from was grievous psychic harm. While her father and three older brothers found refuge in denial, young Signe, her mother's alter ego, assumed a mantle of guilt and self-hatred. Although as an adult (with years in analysis) she came to understand that her mother's act probably had little if anything to do with her, by then its impact on her had irrevocably shaped her life. Here, she looks at her own past and traces her family's history in a kid of psychogenealogy, seeking the forces that impelled her mother to choose death. Hammer's memory of early childhood events is at times rather astonishing, and her conclusions about the attitudes and behavior of long-dead ancestors may not be totally convincing, but she has a poet's eye for images, and those she selects have a truth of their own. This memoir reveals not only Hammer's struggle to understand her mother's suicide, but also her long search for the real person her mother was and her equally long search for her own real self. A harrowing tale of survival in a truly dysfunctional family.
Pub Date: May 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-939149-49-4
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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