At once pointless and moving, Hood’s narrative is too sketchy and diffuse to come into any sort of clear focus—which becomes...
Tearjerker novelist Hood (Ruby, 1998, etc.) sits down to flip through her family album in this sentimental account of her father’s battle with cancer.
“The day my father was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, I decided to go and find him a miracle.” Many Italian-Americans will see nothing ironic in the author’s tone, inhabiting as they do a world in which supernatural grace is seen to be only somewhat less accessible than fresh figs or decent ricotta cheese. Hood set out on her errand with a good deal of self-consciousness, however. For one thing, she is only half-Italian (her father was a Baptist from the Midwest). For another, she had put most of that old-time religion behind her when she grew up, went to college, became a writer, married a Protestant, and moved into the American mainstream. But all the old stories (of curses, evil eyes, healing potions, and miraculous statues) were still stowed away in the dimmer recess of her imagination, and in the twilight of her father’s illness they began to shine with an unfamiliar new light. So she set off on a series of pilgrimages—first to find a cure, and later (after her father died in spite of her efforts) to find an answer. Some of the places she describes (e.g., Mont-St. Michel, Chartres, Lourdes) will be familiar ground for most readers, but others (El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico) are a good deal more obscure, and some (like the Massachusetts town where a comatose girl has developed a large cult as a “victim soul”) are downright creepy. The final pilgrimage, to her mother’s ancestral village in Italy, seems an appropriate site to wrap up the action, but it doesn’t really succeed in imparting much shape to what is a basically formless, if diverting, tale.
At once pointless and moving, Hood’s narrative is too sketchy and diffuse to come into any sort of clear focus—which becomes an annoyance in the end, despite many fine vignettes.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24259-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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