A moving, enlightening, and humorous memoir of the friendship between two women, aged 44 and 94. Komaiko is divorced and childless, the author of 18 children’s books, who, as a forever-young Dylan fan, fears aging and mortality. She finds that L.A., the “liposuction capital of the universe,” is the wrong place in which to hit middle age. Burnt out and despairing for her lost youth, she decides to look her future in the eye and volunteers to “adopt” an elderly woman in a senior residence, to whom she pays regular visits. She’s matched up with a blind woman in her 90s. But Adele is courageous, full of youthful enthusiasm and intelligence, and has a full “memory bank” that affords her a rich life of recollection: her mother worked with suffragette Susan B. Anthony and helped start the A&P company. But in this warm book about aging and friendship, Adele is most remarkable for reviving the spirits and youth of the woman who thought she would be comforting a lonely person waiting to die. Komaiko’s sense of humor prevents the memoir from warming one’s heart to the point of cardiac arrest, with earthy descriptions of the aged people she meets (she calls one woman “bulldozer in a muumuu—). The author begins by pitying and fearing these “people who had to give up their homes [and] waited to move into their plots,” but she ends up coming often to see her new friend, who serves as inspiration and surrogate grandma. The memoir turns maudlin by the end (“doing for others is what makes life worth it”), but by then, we—re every bit as hooked on Adele as Komaiko. The author rediscovers not only friendship, but romance as well. Komaiko has written a poignant memoir that turns despair into joy.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58238-048-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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