A simple exercise comprised of equal parts crass, snarky humor and narcissistic blather.
Actress Mollen delivers a collection of 15 raunchy essays.
A sampling of a few of the titles within this assemblage: “Behind Every Crazy Woman, There’s an Even More Batshit Mother”; “The Birthday Whore”; “Hand Jobs: The Fine Art of Getting a Mani-Pedi Next to Your Husband’s Ex (Who Hates You)”; “Chicks Before Dicks”; “Nobody Wants to be Your Fucking Bridesmaid”; and “You Were Molested.” Granted, Mollen warns readers regarding her blunt views: “There is zero reason to be ashamed of announcing and acting on your real feelings. Life is too short for bullshit. I’m thirty-three, and my tits drop about half an inch a year. In other words, it’s all downhill from here.” Called the funniest woman on Twitter by the Huffington Post, the author freely throws off her few inhibitions throughout these pieces. Wading into Mollen’s essays eventually creates reader fatigue akin to being cornered by a self-centered bore at a cocktail party. The author is unrelentingly candid. A passage from the essay titled “One Shade of Grey” explains Mollen’s attempt at spicing up her marriage (to fellow actor Jason Biggs) with a series of sex toys and enhancements. Here and elsewhere, the author demonstrates her penchant for humor in the vein of Sarah Silverman’s most X-rated material, but Mollen is simply not as clever. “Sometimes I’d contemplated writing a movie, then stop and buy something online instead,” she writes. “I never saw myself as a writer. I have horrible grammar and can’t spell to save my life. I never had an English teacher single me out or imply that I showed any promise beyond being a B+ student.” Perhaps the author should stick to acting.
A simple exercise comprised of equal parts crass, snarky humor and narcissistic blather.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04168-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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