A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.
A memoir of survival and New Age spirituality that encompasses three generations of a working-class Polish-American family.
After debut author Stone was born in Wisconsin during 1969’s Summer of Love, she was meant to be given up for adoption, but her mother changed her mind at the last minute. During her childhood, she says, her father was absent and her mother was undependable, so her most stable influences were her down-to-earth Polish immigrant grandparents. Although Zofie and Loosha had strictly raised their own children with an iron hand and a leather switch, according to Stone, they treated her with persistent affection during her turbulent childhood. She says that she saw her parents’ failings—including neglectful parenting and addiction—all too clearly, but she admired their free spirits even as she suffered herself. She lost her virginity at 14, and she later felt the first stirrings of attraction to women, which would define her adult identity. Meanwhile, her mother, she says, stayed with an abusive boyfriend who almost killed her. As the author struggled to end what she saw as a family cycle of self-destruction, she was buoyed by a love of writing and music; she was also drawn to holistic spiritual practices, such as reiki and meditation, which helped her gain self-awareness. Overall, Stone’s memoir is disarmingly chatty in tone; at one point, for instance, she follows up a description of an Arizona landmark with the sentence: “The entire story is quite interesting if you want to google it.” She also occasionally inserts real-time comments: “(A dove is cooing as I write this—how awesome!)” This makes for an intimate reading experience, as do her vivid descriptions of colorful figures in her life, such as Zofie, who once expressed her anger at Loosha by throwing her own false teeth at him. Occasionally, the narrative seems overly detailed, as in a long description of the legal problems that arose after Stone’s mother’s death. However, readers will remain engaged as she attempts to transcend the obstacles in her life.
A deeply personal and revealing book about one woman’s attempt to find family, identity, and spiritual peace.Pub Date: May 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982203-98-6
Page Count: 154
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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