by Zoe Niklas Janice Harper ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A memoir about overcoming abuse and finding a true definition of family that’s uplifting, upsetting, and repetitive by turns.
A deathbed confrontation frames Niklas’ account of a fraught relationship with her troubled, abusive mother.
The author’s biological mother, Zodie Victor, faced death at the age of 52 after years of hard living. Gale, Zodie’s eldest daughter, and the author, her youngest, gathered at her bedside in the hospital. Niklas tells of deciding to finally confront her mother and then recounts what she says were years of instability and abuse at her parent’s hands. She narrates her troubled childhood, which she portrays as terrifying and complex due to her mother’s multiple failed relationships, violent mood swings, and addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. Her parent’s issues, she says, endangered her and her sister on multiple occasions. Specifically, the author writes that one of her mom’s husbands molested her, and another frequently got into physical and verbal altercations with her mother. After the teenage Gale managed to leave the family, Niklas was left to fend for herself and serve as her mother’s caretaker. When Niklas was finally sent by the state to live with her best friend’s family, it led to a tug of war between her mother and the Dimocks for Niklas’ love and attention. While her mother attempted to bribe Niklas with pets, clothing, and trips to the movies, the Dimocks showed her simple love and care, allowing her to have a true childhood. The author spent years torn between her loyalty to her biological mother and her intense desire for a “normal” existence. As she grew into the adult that stood at her mother’s bedside, she also learned how to stand up for herself and determine her own needs. Niklas’ account of her experiences is often intense and occasionally poetic, such as when she compares herself to an embryonic chick and expresses a desire to develop before she’s “cracked” like an egg. She returns to certain ideas so often they become mantras, including her preoccupation with being a “good girl” and her frequent meditations on her mother’s favorite phrase, “blood is thicker than water.” Such belabored phrases, as well as the somewhat clunky philosophizing at the memoir’s end, detract from the overall reading experience. However, they don’t take away from Niklas’ message of strength and resilience.
A memoir about overcoming abuse and finding a true definition of family that’s uplifting, upsetting, and repetitive by turns.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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