A memoir of a life in crisis that may challenge female readers to face some of their darkest fears.
A blackly humorous, deeply personal story from a playwright and solo theater artist.
In 1999, Cohen (Writing and Theatre/The New School) was a 44-year-old divorcée raising an adopted daughter and dating a 34-year-old fellow performer. Her gynecological history was bleak—a DES daughter with an abnormal uterus, she had been told she was infertile and believed herself to be on the brink of menopause. When a hard lump appeared in her abdomen, she feared it was cancer. After some absurd misdiagnoses, however, she learned that she was six-months pregnant. In three “Acts,” Cohen reveals her reactions to this news and the ensuing complications of a high-risk pregnancy, possibly damaged fetus and lack of adequate medical insurance. “Unbridled Good Fortune” ends with the author considering an abortion. “What I Know” chronicles the three anguished and often indecisive months that culminated with the birth of her baby. In “An Unexpected Life,” Cohen discusses three therapy-filled years and, finally, a malpractice suit against the doctors who misdiagnosed her. Periodically, the author inserts lists titled “What I Know,” the items of which change as she learns new “facts” and as her thoughts and feelings about the situation change. At times her humor is harsh, particularly in her caricatures of her endocrinologist and of certain students in her storytelling class. The questions that Cohen deals with—whether or not to abort, to place her baby up for adoption or to sue for malpractice—are serious, even controversial, and her frankness in dealing with them can be disconcerting.
A memoir of a life in crisis that may challenge female readers to face some of their darkest fears.Pub Date: July 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02095-9
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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