Notable for its spare, intense prose and the author’s self-deprecating frankness about her failures as well as those of her...
Novelist McCracken (Niagara Falls All Over Again, 2001, etc.) relates her struggle to deal with the tragedy of a stillborn son.
She begins with a bizarre comment from a fan who suggested, years before the author miscarried, that she ought to write a book “about the lighter side of losing a child.” McCracken continually revisits this comment in a memoir as slim and piercing as a stiletto. She gradually reveals the horrors of her experience, peeling back layers of memories to reach the most haunting one: delivering her son two days after she learned that he was dead. In a series of artful vignettes, the author staggers rather than glides through her story. Quick, sometimes painful glimpses delineate her adored husband, her writing career, friends who did the right thing and friends who didn’t. McCracken and her English spouse were living in rural France during her first pregnancy. They playfully called the fetus Pudding, “for some complicated, funny-only-to-the-progenitors reason.” They visited several doctors, none terribly satisfactory, and so decided to have a midwife deliver. Immediately following the baby’s death on April 27, 2006, they burned much of what they’d bought for their son and fled to England, then to America, where she had a teaching position waiting. Just a few months later they learned she was pregnant again, and the couple again bounced from one doctor to another until they found a woman they loved. Their son Gus was born one year and five days after they lost Pudding. Through it all, McCracken struggled to write and to forgive herself. “Closure is bullshit,” she declares, but her memoir shows her achieving a sort of peace, though never a mindless tranquility.
Notable for its spare, intense prose and the author’s self-deprecating frankness about her failures as well as those of her loved ones.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-02767-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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