MY MOTHER'S WARS

Name: MY MOTHER'S WARS
Author: Lillian Faderman
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5052-1

by Lillian Faderman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2013

Rich in source material and historical detail, the book suffers from the author's pulpy prose style. Still, worth reading...

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Faderman (Naked in the Promised Land, 2004, etc.) reconstructs her mother's experiences as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York.

The author has a knack for tracking down details that bring a story to life, and her descriptions of her mother Mary's journey from a Latvian shtetl to the garment factories and Bronx apartment buildings of 1930s New York are vivid and memorable—as are her descriptions of the dangers faced by the relatives Mary left behind in Latvia. Unfortunately, the fascinating raw material falters under the weight of Faderman’s ponderous prose. The author’s overreliance on heavy-handed foreshadowing saps the narrative energy, and the constant invoking of her mother's "destiny" feels contrived. Faderman's simultaneous resentment of the father who treated her mother badly and gratitude for the man who helped make her is a tension worth exploring; however, the author merely (and repetitiously) asserts it. Faderman's scrupulousness in constructing a faithful historical narrative is admirable, but her writing is overheated and cliché-ridden: moments lead “inexorably” to “what she would pay for to her last rattling breath,” the spread of the “cancer” of fascism is “inexorable,” Americans turn “a blind eye and a deaf ear” to Hitler's aggressions, etc.

Rich in source material and historical detail, the book suffers from the author's pulpy prose style. Still, worth reading for those interested in the lives of Jewish immigrants in New York and the spread of fascism in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.

Pub Date: March 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-8070-5052-1

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HOLOCAUST

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.