A charming, insightful account.
In her debut memoir, Bines recounts her volatile marriage while pondering the many influences that bound her to her alcoholic husband for so many years.
Bines grew up in a passionate if dysfunctional French Canadian home. Her mother, a glamorous but unstable woman, was a portrait in extremes who modeled the sort of temperamental alcoholic Bines would later marry. Her father, a mild-mannered man, attempted to keep peace at all costs. Bines qualified as a teacher at a young age and saved money to travel extensively with female friends, immersing herself in other cultures and making rounds on the party circuit. Coming of age in the 1960s, Bines cast aside her family’s traditional Catholic mores to explore her sexuality. She dated a series of decent, unremarkable young men before falling for Dick, who was wild and unpredictable, with a penchant for partying and dangerous pranks. Soon she and Dick married and became parents, and after a series of humiliating incidents and brushes with the law (Dick passed out in his dessert plate after dinner with the boss and drunkenly demolished a ticket booth after a dispute with a parking attendant), Bines realized she married a troubled alcoholic. The story begins in medias res, in a lightning quick series of domestic disputes that took place around the time of Bines’ divorce from Dick. The intensity of these reported conversations, coupled with a total lack of context, is initially confusing. As Bines goes on to describe her upbringing in gloriously vivid detail, however, showing how she gained her independence early in life only to suppress it once more in marriage, she provides much more captivating, fluid reading. Bines’ frank conversational style is both humorous and engaging, as when she tells of her halfhearted attempts to join the swinging ’70s with a game of strip poker: “I started crying….One more hand and I was down to my top and quit. I had a hissy fit and walked out of the room and locked myself in the bathroom.”
A charming, insightful account.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499024661
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
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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