An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.
An immigrant struggles with health and employment issues before finding hope in her faith.
Born and raised with six siblings in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, debut author Edwards and her family immigrated to New York in the mid 1980s in search of prosperity. Instead, her educated parents, who were soundly middle class in Guyana, found themselves working menial jobs as nannies and security guards—a cycle of underemployment that Edwards herself would confront after graduating from college and moving to Atlanta. For years, she would seek a job as a copy editor to no avail: “Surely, I was qualified and skilled to work in my field, but somehow nothing opened up.” Edwards soon set her mind to moving to Florida, but before she could actualize her vision of a sunnier, happier existence as a teacher, she found a lump in her left breast. Without health insurance, she sought local clinics to have a lumpectomy but went more than a year with no follow-up visits. Although she created a new life in Florida, it was marred by horrible students and a cancer that had spread through her bones. By the book’s end, Edwards discovers support and relief in her Christian faith, but her story always returns to the many disappointments she suffered in the United States. “The rules of the game had changed,” she writes of the American dream, “and I evidently never got an update.” The theme of an immigrant’s plans becoming derailed by timely social issues like health insurance and hiring freezes should resonate strongly with readers. But Edwards never fleshes out her recollection. It remains unclear if she intends her story to be an American tragedy or a Christian tale of triumph filled with traumatic elements. Her tendency to use verbose, academic language also gets in the way of clarifying her objective (“I considered the entrapment of being in a cultural dichotomy where younger immigrants contended with the dissonance of living through our parents’ worldview or adopting that of the new world”). In addition, truly upsetting moments—like her decision to shrug off the cancer destroying her body or the sudden, unexplained death of her brother—certainly don’t help to guide this memoir, which is in great need of a clearer direction.
An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1269-8
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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