A long-winded but immersive chronicle.
The story of an African-American born shortly before the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Davidson’s (When Clans Collide, 2013, etc.) second memoir of a planned trilogy picks up where his previous book left off: his parents’ migration to the industrial North from the agricultural South, where they experienced institutional discrimination. At one point, Davidson recounts a moment of “discombobulation” after a classmate socked him on the jaw, leaving him bewildered and angry. These two feelings went on to comprise most of his reactions to events in his life, including his involvement in a neighborhood he dubs “Stupidville,” where drugs ran rampant and danger lurked. Davidson offers abstract descriptions of his interactions in Stupidville, rather than recounting his substance abuse in detail, but his reckless ways led him to blow paychecks earned during stints as a lineman in Detroit car factories and as a general laborer and made him miss the birth of his first daughter. Davidson finally escaped Stupidville, if not all the habits he learned there, when he joined the military in 1979 at the age of 28. The next decade saw him divorce his first wife and marry a woman he met in the military, eventually moving with her and their daughters to a string of Army bases in Germany, Arizona, Alaska, and Missouri. Later, Davidson earned a Ph.D., became a teacher, and joined the Toastmaster’s Club in order to become a practiced public speaker. Throughout this slow-paced book, Davidson often digresses, describing seemingly insignificant vignettes in an almost gossipy tone. The book’s structure breaks up his life into four segments centered mainly on his childhood, young-adulthood, military career, and present-day life. He does weave in colorful details from each era, describing music, reflecting on popular culture, and offering his views of important historical events. Each section ends with a list of milestones, along with what he calls “knucklehead incidents”—the results of foolish choices that he and his cohorts made. Although Davidson’s memoir isn’t explicitly about overcoming substance abuse, it takes a redemptive view of his rise from “Stupidville” while also remaining wary of the threat of slipping back into his old ways. He effectively presents his story as a cautionary tale marred by drugs, violence, anger issues, and infidelity.
A long-winded but immersive chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4582-1913-8
Page Count: 508
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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