An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.
Professional storyteller and Psychology Today blogger Coleman looks to his past in this eclectic coming-of-age memoir.
Acutely aware of the influences of his drifter sculptor father, “a cross between Ringo Starr and Daniel Boone,” and Holocaust-surviving mother, the author trumpets the bohemian tendencies that inspired his own artistic development. Early on, the author describes his father’s recurrent escape fantasy of road-tripping to Alaska with a clarity that essentially characterizes the thematic structure of the memoir and his life: “saturated with abandon and testosterone and bound with some kind of twisted love plot.” Buffeted on the one hand by his artist father’s rather public paranoia concerning all things adult and, on the other, his mother’s fear of self-revelation, Coleman’s identity formed in the fulcrum of these opposing forces, and he displayed a dramatic penchant for passionate attachments and anti-establishment behavior. As the author matured, he often found himself pining for some unattainable or unsustainable love interest while trying and often failing to measure up to traditional expectations, whether in an MFA writing program or the workplace. One particularly memorable scene occurred in Maine, where Coleman had landed a temporary position as a substitute teacher and had been asked to give a talk on education at a fundraiser for the incumbent governor. His original plan was to “speak for five minutes and then give a short whirling dervish demonstration.” Instead, for some reason unbeknownst even to him, Coleman slowly removed all his clothing, which resulted in the eventual losses of both his job and his love at the time. While the author’s account exhibits flashes of humor and thoughtful introspection—passages analyzing his mother’s reasons for hiding her Jewish identity prove especially moving—the memoir is far too episodic and inconsistent to cohere.
An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8698-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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