by William Lee Brent ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996
Brent's riveting memoirs of his odyssey through memorable times, from a Louisiana sharecropper's shack to exile in Cuba. In June 1969, Brent hijacked a TWA airliner en route from Oakland to New York City and diverted it to Cuba. Appropriately, this event comes almost precisely midpoint in Brent's memoirs, because there are two virtually distinct life stories here. In the first, Brent talks about growing up in poverty in bad neighborhoods where the lure of the street and his own rebellious inclinations led him from school to a life of drugs, drink, and petty crimes; to jail; to a political awakening as a Black Panther; and finally, to a violent shootout with the police. The post-hijacking story is about Brent's life in Cuba, where he fled after the shootout. Brent spent nearly two years in jail as a suspected American agent (falsely accused, he alleges, by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver) before finally being released to a villa full of fellow hijackers and non-Cuban would-be revolutionaries. Unlike most of his fellow expatriates, Brent slowly integrated himself into Cuban life; now 65, he lives in retirement in Havana. Both stories are told so dispassionately that they could almost have been written by a journalist tapping into Brent's memories, but the narrative's spareness does nothing to detract from its power or fascination. With remarkably little cant, rhetoric, or bitterness, and with a fair amount of criticism of both himself and his revolutionary colleagues, Brent offers an everyman's inside view of growing up poor in black America, of the Black Panthers, and of Cuba. Brent's story reads like a novel concocted to take readers inside the mind of a black revolutionary and revolutionary Cuba; that it is true makes it an important chronicle of our times.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2486-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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