Kenison’s wise comments on what she calls “the humble business of life” are often a pleasure to read. With repetition,...
From the author of Mitten Strings for God (2000), another gentle reminder to mothers to slow down and savor the joys of the quotidian.
For Kenison, ordinary days were in somewhat short supply in the period covered by this memoir. She decided that her suburban Massachusetts community was too high-pressure and competitive, and that her family would be better off in a more leisurely rural setting. Before finding a new home, the Kenisons sold theirs and moved into her parents’ home along with their two adolescent sons. The house they found in New Hampshire was a run-down, 200-year-old summer cottage. After camping out in it for one idyllic summer, they tore it down and designed and built a new, larger house. While constructing a house is a process normally fraught with tension, the Kenisons’ experience was aggravated by the fact that she unexpectedly lost the job she had held for 16 years, as series editor of The Best American Short Stories. Eventually the new house was, if not completed, at least in move-in condition. As they settled in, the author’s older son, Henry, was in his final year of high school, and anxiety about college admission replaced construction concerns, at least for the author. Kenison, who writes of the necessity of letting go of one’s children, apparently had a hard time actually doing it, and the space devoted to Henry’s struggles and accomplishments seems disproportionate to the rest of the text. Meanwhile, her younger son was going through an exasperating teenage rebellion. “I am constantly reminded of just how high adolescents highs can be on any given day and just how low the lows,” she writes. “What I love most, though, are the rare and deliciously peaceful plateaus in between.”
Kenison’s wise comments on what she calls “the humble business of life” are often a pleasure to read. With repetition, however, the sweetness quotient becomes cloying.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-40948-3
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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