A fresh and timely perspective on the immigrant experience—required reading for fans of Stefanovic and a strong inducement...
A writer and raconteur chronicles her life growing up in the former-Yugoslavian immigrant subculture of 1990s Australia.
Stefanovic (You're Just Too Good to Be True, 2015), the host of the literary salon Women of Letters New York, uses the eponymous pageant to introduce the “ex-Yugos,” immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who found refuge in Australia from the brutal wars of the Slobodan Miloševi? regime. The author’s adolescence coincided with the dissolution of her country. Her parents, anti-Miloševi? activists and members of an urban intellectual elite, sensed the coming storm and moved their family abroad to secure citizenship and hence an escape route from the impending conflicts. Stefanovic recounts her youth, from earliest memories of life in Serbia to a few formative years spent bouncing between Melbourne and Belgrade and finally back to Australia for good, where she joined the growing Serbian-Australian population forced to watch TV news snippets of their home country imploding. The author effectively explains how, despite her proud ambivalence, she came to embrace “ex-Yugo” culture so thoroughly that she agreed to compete in a gaudy local beauty pageant to represent it. Living between two cultures added fuel to the already blazing fires of adolescent awkwardness, and Stefanovic tends to deprecate rather than sympathize with her past self, whom she casts as pathetic and attention-seeking. Yet being an outsider sharpened her powers of observation and improved her gifts for language, setting her on the path toward a career as a storytelling performer. Eventually, Stefanovic found her way to activism through writing. Her quirky, poignant, relatable anecdotes offer a nuanced and unflinching portrait of lived experience, rejecting the media’s oversimplified accounts of the Yugoslavian wars and helping to break down the monolithic labels applied to refugees from those wars, especially Serbians. Her stories show the ways in which war warps the lives of generations, even those who never witness violence firsthand.
A fresh and timely perspective on the immigrant experience—required reading for fans of Stefanovic and a strong inducement for newcomers to explore the rest of her work.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6574-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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