An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.
In this debut memoir, a little girl in war-torn 1940s Germany grows up to become a successful American businesswoman.
Parrent was too young to remember the bombings that decimated her German city of Essen during World War II, as she was born in 1942. Her three older siblings, however, knew what the warning sound of sirens meant. One of her brothers was forced to join the Hitler Youth, and the family wasn’t told where he was—or if he was alive or dead. Parrent’s father—whose hair had turned white when he was a young soldier in World War I—refused to join the Nazi Party. Because of this, Nazis beat him so badly that he had to have a metal plate implanted in his head. By piecing together her family’s memories, the author paints a portrait of the terror of war that will have readers on the edges of their seats. Her own memories begin with extreme poverty, as her previously middle-class family was forced to scavenge the countryside for scraps of food. These bleak, deeply poignant scenes are the most gripping part of this short account; for example, as a tiny child, she was thrilled by a single pear a lady had given her, because having fruit at all was such a rarity. Parrent’s clear, incisive, and often vivid prose flows quickly: “The destruction of the bombings erased all shrubs and trees, and no flowers lived anywhere.” After her mother’s horrific death, she says that she faced abuse from her father—he once beat her so badly that she lost consciousness, she writes—before she married and moved to America. This strong woman’s subsequent story intertwines sorrow (the death of a son, divorce, and the deaths of two husbands) with joy (the birth of a daughter) as she tells of working to create a successful temp-agency business, which she opened in 1979. The conclusion, however, is disappointingly abrupt, listing her current activities, including community theater and flying lessons.
An autobiography whose portrait of wartime leaves a lasting impression.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0750-7
Page Count: 106
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
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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