A light and sweet account of a rural upbringing.
A woman remembers the sights, sounds, smells, and events of her Florida childhood in this memoir.
Baxter (Write Your Memoir: One Story at a Time, 2017, etc.) was born in the front room of a Florida “cracker” house, named for its open-air dividing hallway. An unexpected surprise for her parents after the births of her sisters Patsy and Anetha, the author was raised by a caring and loving clan. Like almost everyone else in the rural community, the family made its living growing tobacco, corn, and other staple crops; relied on trading and planting more than store-bought commodities for the day-to-day needs of its home; and didn’t have any next-door neighbors. Trees and fields separated the homestead from the next one. This isn’t to say that Baxter didn’t grow up in a close community—some of the most touching portions of the book describe her regular visits to her grandparents’ house down the road, where family members gathered their mail, baked holiday fruitcakes, and caught up on gossip. The author had an especially warm relationship with her great-grandfather Tip, a gentle soul who spent most of his time smoking on the front porch and singing to the children before dementia incapacitated him. In 75 chapters, broken into 6 segments describing important phases of the author’s childhood, Baxter uses anecdotes to provide a comprehensive, striking picture of her life, from her babysitter/dog Tommy to her father’s series of automobiles and her combative sibling relationships. Her pragmatic, whip-smart, and loving mother, Ethel, is captured with particular vibrancy (“Mama read stories to us and taught us how to do things, like make windmills with construction paper and a stick”). Baxter’s early years were not uneventful—a series of chapters covers the flood of 1948 while others examine the adjustment of attending school for the first time and her struggle to stop wetting the bed. But anyone looking for an account of trauma or seismic changes won’t find it here—the author provides a charming, sunny story of a childhood (complete with photos) that seems to have been a largely stable and happy one. This means that Baxter’s recollections of how her family lived day to day take center stage in chapters that are largely enjoyable thanks to her clear and vivid writing style.
A light and sweet account of a rural upbringing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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