by Jay Ponteri ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013
As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the...
What purports to be an unflinchingly, devastatingly honest look at the author’s marriage—and the institution of American marriage in general—instead reveals its layers of deceit, even self-deception.
There must be some domestic discord in the air. Thematically, this memoir by writing professor and literary essayist Ponteri shares much with the recent Judd Apatow film, This is 40, in which the director cast his wife and daughters in a marital comedy drawn from their real life, a movie that even those who found it often funny considered dark and edgy, often uncomfortable. “The phrase married man suggests a man who cannot love other women, a man doomed to loneliness,” writes the author, who confesses “the best sex I’ve ever had is in my head.” And his head is where this memoir necessarily unfolds, as he combines every woman he desires in the way he no longer does his wife into the singular Frannie, “a composite. Frannie is every girl my wife is not. Frannie is the other woman I draw into my fantasy world, every woman to which I masturbate, every woman I ogle.” Frannie is also the focus of a manuscript to which the author devoted “90 minutes a day, five days a week, all this time spent exploring our marriage separate from my wife,” a manuscript found by his wife. She understandably felt betrayed, yet did the author really betray her with a woman who didn’t exist? Even as it explores the layers of truth that are possible within a memoir and the inventions and distortions of memory on which it depends, the writing suffers when it moves from the author’s marriage to marriage itself, the “tight, toxic silence around marriage” that results in “not only our personal failures at marriage but our culture’s collective failure at marriage, the failure of an institution.”
As this personal essay veers toward polemic, its humorless author seems a little too proud of his bravery at voicing the unspeakable, shattering the taboo.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983850489
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Share your opinion of this book
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...
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.