Fans will find this go-round less zippy (forgive the pun), but more honest.
In Kimmel’s follow-up to her well-received memoir about growing up in a tiny Indiana town (A Girl Named Zippy, 2001), the “She” of the title is Kimmel’s mother, whose mid-life decision to attend college in the early 1970s disrupted her family’s equilibrium.
Kimmel picks up where she left off: The Jarvis family is still in Mooreland, a town of 300 where everyone knows not only your name but most of your business. Zippy’s best friends are still Rose and Julie. Her much older sister Melinda is still bedeviling her. Her seriously overweight, clearly depressed mother is still sitting on the couch reading book after book while Zippy’s slightly mysterious father still comes and goes as he pleases. And Zippy is still a carefree tomboy frequently getting into humorous scrapes and secure in the bosom of friends and family. But change is in the air. Melinda gets married and is soon raising her own babies, the two new loves in Zippy’s life. Zippy’s father, after retiring early from his factory job on disability, volunteers as a sheriff’s deputy. School consolidation introduces new friends into Zippy’s life. Most important, Zippy’s mother Delonda, who left behind her ambitions and middle-class background when she married Bob Jarvis at 17, decides to attend Ball State University. Despite having no money, no driver’s license and a disapproving husband, she makes the daily commute—she pays expenses on her VW beetle by becoming a driving advertisement for Herbal Essences shampoo—and excels in her classes, going on to earn her masters and teach English at the local high school. As Delonda’s horizons broaden, her marriage falls apart. Kimmel carefully limits the darkness to the edges until the last chapters, but sadness at losing her father to divorce permeates her stories, leavening their tendency toward cuteness.
Fans will find this go-round less zippy (forgive the pun), but more honest.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8499-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
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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