The sap flows heavily in this book about mothers who are heroes, role models, guardian angels and superwomen.
A collection for readers who admire or can relate to those who wholly revere their selfless, sainted mothers.
A note that Erspamer (A Letter to My Cat: Notes to Our Best Friends, 2014, etc.), the former executive vice president of programming and development for the Oprah Winfrey Network, wrote to her mother sets the tone for this carefully curated assortment of letters intended to inspire and entertain. The contributors—distinguished and prominent people in their fields—all turned out well-adjusted and happy (neurotics need not apply). Unfortunately, the author includes no insolent voice or anyone who had a more complicated or disappointing relationship with his or her mother. Worse, much of the writing is mawkish or just plain bad: “Though your grip was weakening that night in the hospital, your hands demonstrated an incredible work ethic”; "Thank you for being the most AMAZING Grandmama in the whole world!" Singer Josh Groban's letter is atypical, self-deprecating and comic ("I was odd, I was hyper and sometimes I spoke in my native Martian tongue") in its expression of gratitude for his mother's forbearance. Actress Mariel Hemingway (of the legendarily dysfunctional Hemingway clan) is a welcome tonic, offering a unique sentiment in this book full of repetitive romanticism as she expresses sorrow for her depressive, alcoholic mother's sadness with honesty and comfort: "You had too much invested in the hurt, which became your life." Most readers likely have a more balanced, and perhaps unpleasant, view of their mothers; this is a warm bath of a book that, for some readers, will inspire rueful and sardonic laughter. Other contributors include Kristin Chenoweth, will.i.am, Cat Cora, Monica Lewinsky, Dr. Phil McGraw, Suze Orman, Kelly Osbourne and Shania Twain.
The sap flows heavily in this book about mothers who are heroes, role models, guardian angels and superwomen.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3967-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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