Deserves a wide audience.
Skloot sketches the similarities between his own mental deterioration due to a brain-ravaging virus and his nonagenarian mother’s dementia.
This sequel to In the Shadow of Memory (2003) opens shortly after Skloot moves his mother from her home in New York to a long-term care facility near his Oregon residence. For most of her life, Lillian Skloot was a bitter, harsh woman; her son now finds himself navigating an emotionally charged role reversal as he tries to accept the sweet, childlike dependent that she has become. Perhaps the most distinguished aspect of this book, sections of which were previously published in The Best American Science Writing 2003, The Best American Essays 2004 and The Antioch Review, is Skloot’s economy in rendering his miserable childhood. Instead of lengthy, purple litanies of youthful horrors, he offers spare sentences that evoke a world. “For years I thought mothers normally bit deep gouges into their own wrists when children spilled a glass of milk,” he writes. “I imagined all boys and girls listened while their mothers dialed the phone, asked to talk to the director of the county hospital’s ‘insane unit,’ and asked if there was a room available for a little boy who had disobeyed his mother.” The book does, at times, feel disjointed. (At one point, for example, Skloot interrupts an eloquent description of his mother for a seemingly irrelevant recollection of an adolescent romance. Perhaps this disjointedness pushes the reader even further into the author’s territory, a place where our minds are not reliable, where we feel dislocated, where we have to come to terms with our own frailty and the frailty of those we love.
Deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-4318-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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