Rife with obscene details, Stollak’s fluffy memoir gives her a platform to replay dates as well as to reflect on her failed...
Debut memoir recounting the romantic adventures of both a 20-something New York City singleton and her feisty Florida grandmother.
At 24, stinging from a breakup with a boyfriend she'd hoped to marry, Stollak was living in Manhattan and earning close to six figures per year as a cocktail waitress at a swanky nightclub. Lonely and unmotivated, she'd majored in film production at New York University but wasn't pursuing her passions in either work or love. At the urging of her spirited grandmother, aka Granny, she began to see the upside of being an attractive, single woman. "Why aren't you putting yourself out there?" she asked over the phone from South Florida. "Are you at least having recreational sex?" Proclaiming that Granny gives her advice she "needs to hear," Stollak relays her ensuing romantic and sexual misadventures and triumphs. Simultaneously, following the voluntary ending of a 32-year love affair that outlasted her failed marriage, Granny began dating, too. "It was time," writes Stollak, "to relinquish our egos, bury the stigma, and embrace the humility of the online dating process." Both women created profiles and shared with one other, often in crass detail, their respective responses and in-person encounters. The process also taught them more about what each one required in a partner. Granny's positivity rubbed off on Stollak, giving the latter the ability to laugh about her most terrible dates. As the number of would-be suitors increases, readers’ patience for the author’s flippancy goes down.
Rife with obscene details, Stollak’s fluffy memoir gives her a platform to replay dates as well as to reflect on her failed relationship with her ex and, at heart, to renew her appreciation for her grandmother.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-11452-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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