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SIBERIAN EDUCATION

Name: SIBERIAN EDUCATION
Author: Nicolai Lilin
ISBN: 978-0-393-08085-8

GROWING UP IN A CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD

by Nicolai Lilin translated by Jonathan Hunt ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2011

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Visceral memoir of a rough, criminal upbringing in a curious outpost of exiled Siberians near the Moldovan border.

Transnistria was inhabited by a group of transplanted Siberian Urkas, deported during the Stalinist era of Communist collectivization and now deeply entrenched in a nether region. “The people of our villainous district were like one big family,” writes Lilin, who grew up in a house full of wondrous weapons, icons and crucifixes. His father and other males of the family were professional criminals who made good livings as robbers and thugs and boasted a string of prison sentences and violent run-ins with the police. From an early age, the author had to learn the criminal code of conduct, involving elaborate gun-handling rules, resistance to government at all costs, prison stories and the forming of special relationships with older community members, who taught him the old ways. By reciting a Pushkin poem, the author earned a cherished pike, or flick knife, the traditional weapon of the Siberian criminal, and became a hero among his friends. Lilin was also a talented artist and apprenticed at age 12 to learn the trade of the kolshik, or tattoo artist. He and his band of boys were dubbed “Siberian Education,” and were soon embroiled in gang fights, running messages for their fathers and skirmishes with police. In between stints in juvenile prison, the author relates touching moments, such as the prison etiquette still observed when the old criminals dined at Aunt Katya’s restaurant. Lilin’s youthful scrapes and wild yarns eventually ran up against Russian military service at age 18, and the hothead was shipped out to fight saboteurs in Chechnya. A stark account that projects raw energy and youthful swagger.

Pub Date: April 11, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-393-08085-8

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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.